TRIALS AND TRIBULATIONS

Barbara Ponse

          Rose couldn’t stop grinning.  She marveled at the sight of Mo’s dusky skin right next to her freckled, sunburned arm. Her heart bumped against her chest.  She grabbed Mo’s hand, squeezed it in her own and swung his arm back and forth in wide arcs.  She shot a glance at Mo.   He giggled, his white teeth gleamed against his mulberry lips.

  They sauntered up to Mrs. Young’s cranberry red front door, flip-flops slapping against the brick path as they walked.  They stepped up on the small brick porch. Rose’s face shone with sweat. Standing on tiptoe, she took hold of the brass eagle knocker and rapped. Too excited to wait for an answer, she pressed the doorbell.

Mrs. Young opened the door. Her flowered housedress was white with flour spilled all down the front. She smiled, hesitated in the doorway and rubbed at the dishtowel in her hands. The minute she laid eyes on Mo, her smile turned upside down. Clutching the towel against her stomach, she moved back a few steps and half hid behind the door.

Mo dropped Rose’s hand and stared down at his toes. Rose tried to recapture his hand but he’d moved just out of reach. His arm hung slack and uninviting at his side.

          Mrs. Young peered around the door.  Fear made her blue eyes look hard as stone. “You gotta come in now, Rose!”  She turned her head in Mo’s direction but wouldn’t look at him.  “And he’s gotta go!  Now!”

          Rose’s face burned red, her mouth screwed into a scowl. Her body tensed up so much, she found herself standing on one foot.  She swallowed in a gulp of air, cleared her throat but her would-be determined voice still came out as a whine,   “I—we just wanted to go back to the picnic.  There’s a picnic—at the tobacco field.  Mo and I—“

“No!” Mrs. Young interrupted her.  “ You’ve gotta come on in right now Rose! Come on! It’s time!”  She swung her head in the direction of the inside of the house. 

Mo’s head hung down.  Rose couldn’t see his eyes. He turned to go.  “See you tomorrow at work, Mo!” she said.  Her voice skidded up in a plea of apology.  But Mo shuffled off to the tobacco fields without so much as a glance back at her.

Rose stood rooted in front of the door.  Shame ran like fire through her body.  She shook herself.  Her eyes defiant, she looked straight ahead. She marched into the house, swept past Mrs. Young then swerved around to face her.  Her breath came fast and hard.  She planted herself so close in front of Mrs. Young, that the woman was trapped between Rose and the front door.  Rose could see Mrs. Young’s eyes water up and that she chewed at her bottom lip as she closed the door behind her.  

Rose pulled herself up to her full five feet two inches, put her hands on her hips, and in a tone of injured justice, demanded: “Why did you make me come in?  And why did you treat Mo like that?” Her voice trembled but her words cut sharp. “He’s my friend! ‘He’s gotta go now!’” She mimicked. She leaned forward, and stared into Mrs. Young’s watery blue eyes.

Backed up against the door, stuck halfway between outrage and being cowed, Mrs. Young twisted the towel in her hands. She looked away from Rose, glanced from side to side, as if searching for an escape. She cleared her throat.  Her lips were so rigid, her mouth barely moved when she spoke, making her voice sound muffled.  “Your mother said to watch you while she was away.  And…I”, she blew out a puff of air, sucked in her breath, then continued,  “your mother would not want you going out with a—a nig-nig-grow!”

          “What?  Watch me?  Watch me? Like a two year old? My mother would never, never, say I can’t go out with a Nee-gro!  My mother is not prejudiced!  And besides he’s Not a Nee-gro.  He’s a Hawaiian!”  She tossed her head and leveled a look of scorn at Mrs. Young. She never realized that Mrs. Young was so Prejudiced and so Ignorant!  She didn’t even know the difference between a Negro and a Polynesian!

Rose gave a snort of contempt, turned and jerked her body toward the stairs, and took off up the stairs like she was running from the plague.  All the while, she muttered under her breath what she would tell her mother. She would tell her mother that her friend was Prejudiced! Her mother wouldn’t have had Rose stay here if she knew that.  Her mother wouldn’t even want to be friends with Mrs. Young anymore! Left in Rose’s wake, Mrs. Young, stood at the bottom of the stairs with her mouth open.

Rose ran into the bedroom and slammed the door behind her with a big bang. She hurled her body towards the white chenille-covered bed.  Her shin clunked against the bed frame.  She howled, grabbed her knees, crouched on the bed and cried like an animal.  Finally, the throbbing in her shin subsided. 

She wiped her tears on her arm, rolled over on to her back, and spread her arms out at her sides.  Her pulse thudded like shock waves all over her body as a picture of Christ hanging on the Cross flashed in her mind.  She crossed her feet, putting one on top of the other.  She wondered how long the nails had to be to get through His feet and into the cross.  She sucked in a mouthful of air.  And what would she have done if she had been scourged like Jesus?  Would she have been brave and self-sacrificing like Him?   Would she have screamed? Begged for mercy?  A weight hit the bottom of her stomach like a hot rock with the realization that she would have done anything, said anything to make them stop.  She wouldn’t be willing to die for the sins of the world.  In fact, she never really understood why innocent people should die for other people’s sins, and why God wanted His Son to die.  No, she definitely wouldn’t have been able to stand it.   Maybe she was just a coward.

She sighed, rolled her head back and forth on the pillow.  An image came to her: the sad Virgin at the foot of the Cross, crouched under His feet stained with trickles with maroon ceramic blood, like the statue at St. John’s . She looks like she’s just waiting for the next blow. Rose sniffed to herself, pulled between disgust and admiration.  Suffer, suffer, suffer!  Why?  Why do You want people to suffer?  She screamed at God in her head. The stab of guilt that hit her made her wrench her body up on the bed.  Leaning on her elbows, she stared at the wall.  She knew she was sinning again. Everytime she thought about these things, she ended up sinning. Her thoughts were sins.  Questioning God was a sin.  Doubt was a sin.  She was constantly having bad thoughts and every bad thought, word and deed put another nail in Jesus. 

She gave out a loud sign and collapsed back on the bed.  She shook  her head back and forth trying to shake off her thoughts. Turning on her side, she drew up her knees, crossed her arms across her chest and hugged herself. Her breath came out in rasps and a lump of shame filled her throat. Tears spilled from the corners of her eyes, ran down and soaked into the bedspread.

As she lay there weeping, her thoughts turned to Mo.   She worried about how he felt when Mrs. Young was so rude to him? Could he tell it was because Mrs. Young was prejudiced?  She bet he could tell that right away.  She felt so bad for him.  How horrible it was that she was actually staying in a house with prejudiced people!  Had white people treated him like that before?  He told her that the word for white people in Hawaiian was hoali.   Was that a bad word like nig--?  Ohh!  She wouldn’t not say that word even in her mind. 

She wiped at her eyes with the back of her hand. She squirmed around on the bed at the thought of Mo with his head hung down and how he wouldn’t look at her.  What did he really think of white people?   What did he really think of her? 

Oh God! She whispered. I hope he knows that I’m not prejudiced!  I’m not like that! Sometimes I wish I wasn’t white so I wouldn’t have to worry so much. She squeezed her eyes shut and licked at the tears running down her face.

Then she remembered a story her mother used to tell and a small smile curved her lips.  It was the story about the first time Rose ever saw a Negro. She was about three or four years old at the time, waiting in the car while her mother went into the Belden Library. “When I came out,” her mother would say, “there was a colored woman and her baby in a baby-carriage, and the colored woman was smiling and smiling.  She was just beaming!  I asked what had happened and she said that you had said, ‘What a beautiful tan you have!’” Rose could see the smile on her mother’s face. She could tell, her mother was really proud of her.

She let her arms fall to her sides and stretched out her legs. Mrs. Young was so mean!  She sighed a big sigh and shook her head. Her mother would never be mean like that to anybody, especially not a colored person. Her mother talked about how much Negroes had suffered, she talked about the evils of slavery, and she’d often say how patient and good the Negroes were, how it was a miracle that they weren’t angry.

She remembered a time that she took her mother’s words to school. In the fifth grade at Nathaniel White, some kids were picking on a Negro girl out in the playground.  She really told those kids off!. A couple of them kept sniggering while she explained how Negroes had been brought to America in chains against their will, how white people made them into slaves, and how evil and wrong slavery was.  And she told them that even though Lincoln had freed the slaves, Negroes still suffered to this day.   She told them in no uncertain terms:  White people had absolutely no right to be cruel to Negroes!

She shuddered; she remember that after her speech, she’d had the sense she’d had done something wrong, but she could not figure out what it was.  It wasn’t that the white kids didn’t seem to care about what she’d said, but she could see that the Negro girl did not look happy and had walked away, her face shuttered, closed like a mask. She’d looked embarrassed while Rose was speaking, like she was ashamed. She looked as if she wished Rose would just shut up. 

Despair and confusion felt like a jumble of knots in her brain. Rose pressed on her forehead with her hands. She covered her eyes and began to sob. Why was it so hard to do the right thing!  What was the right thing? You tell the truth, do what seems right and the very person you’re sticking up for gets mad! She socked the bed with her fist.

Her face was wet with tears and snot. She leaned up on one elbow, reached with her other hand in her pocket for a hankie, blew her nose, and caught a glimpse of her swollen face.  Throwing herself back down on the bed, she snuffled and dabbed at her eyes, and went back to thinking about Mrs. Young. 

I can’t understand how Mrs. Young could be like that! She knew what it was to suffer! She had a blind son! He had cancer of the eyes. Everybody felt sorry for him.  She ought to feel sorry for other people like they were sorry for her son.  Her own mother felt sorry for him. She read to him all the time and even made tapes of the books he needed for school.  Her mother always talked about how smart he was. 

Nobody was mean or made fun of him. Even though she hated to think it or say it, he did look scary, his eyes looked really awful.  One eye was open; on the other one, the lid was pulled down, like it was glued down. It was kind of flat like he didn’t have an eye, except you could see a little bit of blue at the bottom coming out of a dark hole. His open eye looked like it was glass, but it wasn’t.  There wasn’t enough bone to hold a glass eye, her mother said.

Even though she knew it was wrong, Rose couldn’t stop staring at his eyes even though it she’d get a strange tightness way down inside. Just thinking about him gave her the willies.  She shivered and blew her nose. She wondered if he knew somehow, how she stared at his dead eyes.

All the questions she had seemed too terrible to ask:  Like: what is it like to be blind?  What did they do to his one eye so that the socket looked empty?  Did they leave in just a piece of his eye?  Yuck!  The thought of a cut eyeball made her clench her teeth.  Is everything black when you’re blind, or is it gray, or white?  Did he have any pictures inside his head from when he was little and could see?  But she could never ask him anything.

Her mother said she should thank God she wasn’t blind and didn’t have cancer. That always made her mad. Why should she have to thank God that she wasn’t blind or have polio and that she had enough to eat?  Why did God make other people blind or crippled? It made her feel like a worm or some terrible, crawly, whiney thing blubbering to God, thanking him for not doing something really horrible to her. 

He’d done enough. He made everything she did, everything she thought seem wrong somehow. He made being alive into a torture.  He made her into a helpless wreck.

She hated all the terrible feelings inside her, how everything made her cry, though she did think, in some way, her suffering must make her special. Maybe it was that she was more sensitive.   She knew other people didn’t get all wrought up the way she did.  She’d heard it often enough: ‘Why don’t you just calm down!’ and  ‘You take everything so seriously!’  Like it wasn’t serious!  Like it wasn’t a matter of life and death!  And besides, she couldn’t help being the way she was! Her mother told her she was marked by Christ!  What did that mean?  That she was supposed to accept all the pain in the world and do nothing but PRAY? She flailed    her arms, pounded her fists on the bed and kicked her feet.  It felt all black inside her head.

Her whole body burned with rage at God. She railed against all the terrible things in the world.  All the things God did that made no sense or were just plain cruel.  She couldn’t stand thinking about Jesus on the Cross.  Why did God let His only begotten Son Die?   Is that what You expect from me?  That I’ll just go like a lamb to slaughter?  Goddamn You, God! 

The yelling inside her came out in a hoarse whisper in the room.  Why do You have to give people cancer?  Why are You so cruel?  And the other horrible, terrible things that You, Supposedly Omniscient, Supposedly Omnipotent, Supposedly All-Merciful God do! Letting children starve, making people poor, putting unbaptized people, (including babies, innocent newborn babies who happen not to be Catholic!) in Purgatory! And what about the Africans and what about the people starving in China and The War and the Nazis and killing the Jews?  Her tears dried and her throat grew hot as she gave God a good piece of her mind.

She grimaced, remembering how her mother had said that before the Jews killed Jesus they had been given a choice, between Barrabas and Jesus.  And that the Jews cried out “Give us Barrabas!” Barrabas was a thief, her mother said.  And the Jews chose Barrabas. “And Jesus?”  They were asked.  And the Jews said, “Let his blood be upon us and upon our children!” Her mother shook her head sadly. “And God said: So be it.”

Rose yelled, “That’s horrible! Making people suffer forever for something they didn’t do! What kind of God would do that?  Why can’t people believe the way they want to believe?  What if people never even heard of Jesus!”

Then her mother said, “Rose, we mere mortals can’t fathom the ways of God.  It’s a mystery!”

Rose saw the unhappiness on her mother’s face even while she said that such a horrible thing was a “mystery”. She’d seen her mother cry over what happened to the Jews during The War.  But why did she keep trying to make excuses for God?  There was no excuse!  She shouted back at her mother, “Ugh! That’s not a mystery!  That’s horrible!  It’s cruel and mean!  A God that takes revenge on people! I don’t know how you can believe in God!  I don’t believe in God! Not that God!” 

Her mother turned white, her voice like ashes and death, “Rose, we are commanded to love God!  Jesus, Mary and Joseph!   Don’t! Don’t say you don’t believe in God!  That’s a terrible thing! A terrible sin!”

“I can’t help it! I can’t help it!”   But inside, Rose was afraid.  What if her mother was right?  What if all the evil and suffering God made happen in the world was part of His Divine Plan? What if it was somehow Right because He did it?  Rose’s head throbbed like it was ready to split open. Beside herself, she slapped at her face, flung her arm across her eyes, turned over on the bed and buried her head in the pillow.  She wished she could just die!  Right now! She cried and cried until no more tears came, till she was empty.

She turned over and lay on her back.  She looked up at the white ceiling, past the places where the tape had started to loosen along the seams of the wallboard, to the clouds beyond and thought about the God she used to believe in.  When she was little. A Good God, a God that streamed down Light from the clouds, the God who made the sky like a blue dome over the earth. She used to think the sky was like an enormous crystal ball that held the ball of the earth inside; like a glass paper-weight, the kind you could shake and see the snow swirl around inside. 

She used to lie on her back in the long gold grass on Sugarloaf Hill and gaze up into the clouds trying to get a glimpse of God. She thought the bright clouds she was seeing were the bottom of heaven, and that maybe, maybe she could spot God the Father sitting up there with His choirs of angels. Sometimes she even thought she could hear singing from up there. She used to believe in miracles.

Of course, she had to learn there was no blue dome. There was only space and more space. Just nothing. Space only looked blue. It was gravity that kept everything down. And, she was told, heaven isn’t up in the sky.  It was in Eternity. Also, God is Invisible and you can’t see him when you’re alive. Only when you’re dead. Only if you get to heaven.  And then you get to sit around heaven and look at Him forever.  She remembered her disappointment when her mother told her that was what heaven was like.  It sounded very boring. It certainly didn’t sound like a reward.

She lay there picking at the rows of chenille, smoothing them down then pulling them up in little ridges.  She smiled to herself and thought, I like the way I had it figured out much better. Much better.  Her breath felt suddenly sweet.  She folded her arms across her chest which rose and fell, gentle and quiet.

Sweat had glued her tee shirt to her back.  She could feel the ridges of chenille press into her damp flesh.  A fly buzzed on the screen of the organdy-curtained window.  She glanced over at the window and watched the fly’s hapless dance. It crawled across the screen, erupted in a flurry of buzzing against the barricade then crawled back only to begin again.

Suddenly she realized she’d completely forgotten to check on how she looked! She shot upright on the bed and turned toward the vanity. Her legs hung down over the edge of the bed. For a moment, she wished she had a vanity with an organdy skirt and a mirror in her own room at home.  At home she had to kneel on the toilet seat to use the medicine cabinet mirror when she wanted to get a good look at her face.  Here, she could see sitting on the bed, but she moved to the little stool in front of the vanity to get a closer look.

She peered into the mirror and let out a gasp.  Her face looked like a red moon and her eyes were round and black under their swollen lids. She pressed at her face with her hands to soothe away the redness. She lowered her eyelids; her eyes looked better that way.  More sophisticated. Actually, her swollen lids added to the effect.  She sucked in her cheeks, and pinched the sides of her nose, trying to make it narrower and longer like Marlene Dietrich. Now her nose looked even fatter from all her crying. 

She practiced smiling while trying to keep her eyebrows raised and her eyelids lowered.   She let go of her nose.  It popped right back out, only now it had white marks on it where she’d pinched it so hard.  It was still the same stupid pug nose she had before she’d started trying to mold it.  Her nose was like a pig snout.  She tried flaring her nostrils but couldn’t keep her eyelids lowered at the same time. 

Her lower lip started to tremble. Her eyes, turned down at the corners, began to blur with tears. Her body slumped on the stool and she looked away from the mirror.  It was no use. She was just ugly.  Then, like a morsel of hope, an idea occurred to her.  Maybe she was an ugly duckling because she would grow into a swan! She smiled, raised her chin, arched back her neck and gazed again into the mirror. Oh God!  She even had freckles on her neck!  And her face had more freckles than the day before!  Look at them! There must be a million, too many to count! And they’ll never, ever join together and become a tan. 

She was a hopeless case. She heaved a great sigh, turned away from the mirror got up and flung her body on the bed.  She lay on her back, looking up at the ceiling and tried to console herself. Mo and other guys who worked on tobacco didn’t seem to notice her freckles or her red hair at all.  At least they didn’t call her Red like some stupid people. She tilted her head, but, how could she be ever be sure they didn’t think she was ugly but were too polite to say it?

 A breeze wafted through the open window and whispered over her body.  She felt her body relax into the bed and watched the dust motes floating in a channel of sunlight shining over her head. She lifted her hands up into the sun; the light was so bright it lit the tips of her fingers, like it was almost shining through them. She moved her hands lazily through the motes when she noticed their shadow image on the wall.  Two fingers up, thumb folded over, a rabbit.  Now a fist, index finger over the thumb, a what? A turkey? No.  An eagle.  Now it’s a duck. Oh stop.  This is for babies. She brought her hands down and began to daydream about the guys.

Many of the guys came from islands, far away.  Places like Barbados and Jamaica , even Hawaii . They came to work in the shade-grown tobacco fields in her little town in Connecticut , during harvest season. Some people from town, like Pauline Costello, and Jane Kjellen, and some older kids worked there, too.  And Rose, at fourteen, was the youngest that had ever been allowed to work there   She had begged and begged her mother and it was probably because of Pauline and Jane, who were friends of her mother from the Catholic Daughters that her mother finally let her. 

Some of the guys that worked there were Negroes, like Shorty from Barbados and Reynaldo who came from Cuba .  Reynaldo looked part Negro and part white. He was the color of coffee and cream and his eyes were black and he had very long lashes.  Oh to have eyelashes like that!  John Robinson from Jamaica was definitely pure Negro, but his features were pure white. The muscles on his arms looked like they were carved out of dark chocolate. His skin was soft and smooth as satin. You could even see the muscles on his chest and back through his tee shirt. He had the most beautiful teeth and was always laughing. How Rose loved to hear him talk! He’d say ‘mon’ and things like, “wat you doin’ mon?” His voice sounded growly but laughing at the same time.

And the singing!  The guys sang songs like ‘Day-O’ and ‘ Kingston Town ’.  She knew the words but she always kept her voice low, so nobody could hear her.  Before working on tobacco, she’d only heard songs like that  on the radio, but never actual people, not actual people from their own countries really singing their own native songs! 

The Hawaiians, Sammy, and Fisher and Mo, had very dark skin, almost like a Negro, but it was more of a yellow brown and their eyes were more Chinese looking and their hair was straight black.  And they had muscles, too, but they were shorter and really not so handsome, but they were really nice all the same.

The only Hawaiian she’d ever seen in her life was Hale Loke on the Arthur Godfrey Show when she went over to her aunt’s house to watch television.  Her parents didn’t have a television. They said they were waiting till it was perfected, but really it was because they didn’t have the money.  Rose made a soft sound in her throat and ran her fingers softly over her midriff.  On the flowered wallpaper, she could see a pale moving shadow.  It was the soft billow and collapse of the organdy curtains. The darker shadow, almost like a steep hill, was her raised knee.

Mo was not the handsomest guy, not anything like John Robinson, but he could play the ukelele and he even taught her a Hawaiian song. With Mo, she wasn’t too scared to sing out loud. 

She got up from the bed, and faced her shadow. It looked so tall and thin!  She tilted her head and watched the head of the tall shadow move with her.  Then, she moved her hands like waves in water, trilling her fingers through the air.  She swayed her hips and in a voice so soft she could barely hear herself she began to sing her Hawaiian song.

In her mind’s eye, she could see all the guys laughing and clapping as they watched her dance her way down the dirt aisle of the tobacco barn hung with rows and rows of fragrant, curing leaves.  And Mo was laughing, “Oh my! Look at my haoli girl dancin’!”  The ladies, her mother’s friends, looked shocked at first, but even they began to clap and stamp their feet while she danced.

Suddenly, John Robinson stood right in front of her.  “Let’s see you do the limbo!” He looked deep into her eyes. She felt herself become a warm, lithe creature.  She began to shimmy her shoulders and bend back, back, back, and her graceful shadow melted back with her.

At first she couldn’t tell if she was hearing something or not. Was someone at the door? She quickly sat down on the bed. Then, softly, softly she heard her name. “Rose, Rose, Honey.” It was Mrs. Young. Rose had  forgotten she was angry. For a moment, she felt the storm start to brew up again inside her.

“Yes.” Her voice was clipped but polite. 

          “Come down for supper, Dear!  And guess who’s here!  Your Mother.  She’s come back!”

          Rose felt her heart jump in her chest, her face lit up in a big smile.  Sometimes when the sounds of thunder and the lightning flashes have enough time between them, it means the storm is off in the distance; it’s passed by.  Rose swung her legs off the bed and leapt to her feet, opened the door and bounded down the stairs.  She could smell the smell of baking, of muffins, of pie.  She could smell butter, real butter. Not damned old oleo.  Rose could tell the difference.  One good thing about Mrs. Young, she thought:  she cooks with real butter!