To The Rescue

Her hands hurt. She held them up to try and see them with the moonlight through the darkness. The broken skin on her knuckles caught a glimmer of light and looked like the satisfying, sweet remnants of raspberry jam. That was her latest injury from the Wilson house, where they insisted on her using a washboard before putting the clothes in their new machine to clean them. Bleeding knuckles were a small price to get the four dollars they paid her every week for a couple days of laundering.

The Wilson house alone would pay for most of her bus ticket to Chicago. With the few extra dollars she earned from cleaning other homes, and hid in plain site among the roots of the blooming wild flowers in the field behind their house, she could also have a meal along the way.

The brakes on the truck screeched loudly as her uncle slowed down for the approaching stop sign. His wide, honey-brown eyes squinted as he peered into the darkened directions of the crossroad to try and see if anything was in the distance. She thought about all that his brown eyes had possibly seen over the years and why they were probably the reason that he didn’t talk much. She imagined him to be a handsome man about forty years ago, before those honey-brown eyes repetitively showed him the unforgivable cost of having coffee colored skin down here in The South.

Again, the loud screeching signaled the truck was slowing down to pull into the bus depot parking lot. The noise reminded her of why the journey that lied ahead was a necessity. She could still hear a faint ringing in her ears after the last blow her husband Macon laid on her. Always careful to not hit her face, because no one in town wanted the display of a battered maid in their good, Christian home, his large hand landed on the side of her head. The blow toppled her to the ground and left her with the constant sound of church bells ringing in the distance.

She looked over at her uncle, who patiently waited on her to process her thoughts. He smiled and nodded in the direction of the Coloreds Only Waiting Room sign dangling from a rusty hinge on the side of the building. “Thank you, Uncle Buddy,” she said before climbing out of the truck and grabbing her small suitcase from the back.

He extended his hand to her with a small, crumpled piece of paper at the end of it. As she struggled to read her cousin’s address and phone number scribbled across the paper, she heard him say, “Be safe.” She watched his honey-brown eyes rim with the distinctive sadness they always showed after the words left his lips.

She managed to return a half smile to him as an assurance that she would do her best to stay safe on the arduous travels that lied ahead. A nod followed her smile before she closed the heavy truck door. She watched her uncle drive away until the red lights disappeared into the darkened distance.

The colored waiting room in the bus depot was small with the stale breath of patrons clouding the air and hanging in its corners. The few benches were crowded with people awaiting their departures, all wearing the same perplexing mixture of worried relief on their faces. Perhaps they too were embarking on an escape.

She stood in front of the dirty ticket window and waited for the fat man on the other side to acknowledge her. “Whatcha want, gal,” he said around the wad of tobacco in his jaw, still not looking up at her.

“A ticket to Chicago, please, sir,” she said softly with the timidness that had been ingrained in her since birth.

The fat man raised his head so that his blue eyes bored into her. He spit a dollop of brown juice into a soda can before saying, “Gal, are you stupid or something?”

She dropped her head further to avert his angry, piercing eyes. “No, sir,” she said in an even softer tone. “A ticket to Chicago, please, sir.”

“You must be stupid, because the next bus to Chicago doesn’t leave for six hours.”

“Yes, sir. A ticket to Chicago, please, sir.”

The fat man shook his head with disbelief and rolled his eyes in disgust. “They don’t pay me enough to deal with dumb niggers,” he said while punching the numbers on the cash register with more force than necessary. After the register drawer opened and a bell range to signal the completion of its calculating, he said, “Twenty-two dollars and forty-five cents.”

She pulled the tightly rolled bills from her jacket pocket and counted out twenty-three dollars before placing them in the opening under the dirty window. Her remaining two dollars went back into her pocket.

The man picked up her money and counted it twice before slowly raising his head back up at her. His blue eyes narrowed and something sinister deposited on his face. “Gal, are you trying to cheat me,” he said with a harsher evil lacing his words.

She looked up at him with confusion.

“This is only twenty-one dollars.” A sneer spread across his lips with an unspoken message of the unfair challenge he was forcing on her. Give up her last two dollars that he watched her put back into her pocket, or risk stating that she had given him twenty-three dollars. A mere statement that could possibly result in her being arrested or even death.

For the last year, between the beatings from Macon and the drudgery of cleaning the homes of people that barely acknowledged her as human being, the number twenty-five had been the skinny ray of sunlight fighting between dark clouds. Twenty-five would get her far away from this life she hadn’t chosen for herself. Twenty-five would take her to a place where optimism was more than just a word she had read long ago in a book. Twenty-five was the number of dollars she had grown among the roots of the wild flowers behind their house, and it was the number of dollars she had pulled from her jacket pocket to pay for her bus ticket to Chicago.

Realizing her inevitable defeat, she reached into her jacket pocket and pulled out her last two dollars. She slowly unrolled them and placed them in the opening beneath the dirty window.

“You niggers are always trying to cheat me,” the fat man grumbled after snatching her last two dollars from the opening.

The tears welled in her eyes as he placed her bus ticket and change of fifty-five cents in the opening. She widened her eyes to keep the tears from breaking and streaming down her face. Her last glimpse of her Uncle Buddy’s sad, honey-brown eyes danced through her head.

As she grabbed her bus ticket and fifty-five cents, the printed word Chicago beat back her welling tears. In her hand was the little bit of money she had left in the world, but she also held a ticket to her rescue.

With the benches tightly packed with others awaiting their departures, she could only find a spot on the floor to begin her six hours of waiting. It was a deliberate choice to arrive at midnight for a bus that didn’t leave until six in the morning. Macon was probably swinging a sledge hammer at this moment to pound a spike into the ground for the new rail track that was being laid. At the break of daylight he would be loading his tools into his truck and preparing for the hour long drive back to their home. And at that same time she would be watching the town of McComb grow smaller in the distance from her bus window. Her excitement subsided the ringing in her ears, relieved her swollen knuckles, and enlightened her to the creative ways fifty-five cents could be stretched over her fifteen hour bus trip. A soda and a hotdog wasn’t a meal, but it would only cost her forty cents. A cup of coffee would only cost her a dime. And she would have a nickel leftover to call her cousin when she arrived.

She scooted down to a spot on the floor in a corner far away from the fat man behind the dirty window. Her bus ticket was gripped tightly in her hands as she kept studying the printed word Chicago on it. She thought back to a few years prior when she last saw her cousin Lorraine during her visit home. Lorraine painted Chicago into a utopia in her mind. “You can go wherever you want and sit anywhere you like. The white people there aren’t like the ones here.”

The printed word Chicago transformed into the word Freedom on her bus ticket. She closed her eyes and saw the bright flashing lights of the city. The ringing in her ears became a melodic tone of jazz music flowing into the paved streets from night clubs. She felt a cool breeze of wind tickling her skin from the lake that divided the city. The tickling inched further up her legs and scratched at her knees.

She opened her eyes to see if the sensation she was feeling was indeed only a part of her fantasy. On her knee she saw a mouse trying to free one of its paws from the entanglement of her stockings. Shock and revulsion made her jump to her feet and dance around until the mouse fell off and scurried away. It was then that she noticed several of them running about and adhering mostly to the corners like the one she was sitting in. The awaiting patrons simultaneously gave her a knowing look. Now she understood why they were packed on the benches.

She moved to lean against the wall on the opposite side of the room where the mouse traffic appeared to be lighter. Six hours of standing would be more than tiresome, but, like the Wilson house, it was a small price.

As a distraction she pulled the paper from her pocket that her Uncle Buddy had given her. She read her cousin’s phone number and address over and over to try and memorize it. After the fifth time she read it, a welcomed distraction distracted her from her distraction. “Bus number three sixty-eight now arriving,” the fat man announced through a speaker and around the wad in his mouth. “Departure for Memphis in twenty minutes.”

A bench was cleared almost immediately as some of the patrons gathered their things and headed to the bus lot in front of the building. She made her way over to the bench and was greeted with the relief of sitting down in a mouse free area.

Relief allowed her mind to resume thoughts of the possibilities that were waiting for her in Chicago. Maybe she could find a job where she got to dress nice everyday like the women she sometimes saw on the magazines in the homes she cleaned. Maybe she would meet a man that would take her out and show her the inside of one of those fancy night clubs. Maybe she would just sit by the water and watch God run his hand across it to make waves.

For the next few hours, she alternated between thoughts of all that she was running to, thoughts of all that she was running from, the printed word Chicago on her bus ticket, and her cousin’s information scribbled on the small piece of paper. Exhaustion began to set in and started pulling her eyelids down. Knowing she needed to stay awake, because falling asleep could be more detrimental than just being cheated out of two dollars, she pressed her swollen knuckles against the unwavering wood of the bench. The pain jolted her back into alertness, and would continue to do so over the next couple hours when her eyelids were heavy.

Again, a welcomed distraction distracted her from her distraction of awakening pain infliction. She hadn’t noticed that, at some time during the night, the fat man had been replaced by a woman with tight pin curls and pursed red lips. “Bus number one twenty-five now arriving,” the woman said with a long drawl. “Departure for Birmingham in twenty minutes.”

She looked down at her bus ticket and saw the number one twenty-five next to the printed word Chicago. Her eyes were no longer heavy, and her latest self infliction of pain subsided. She, along with many others, gathered her things and made her way to the bus lot.

The sun was breaking over the horizon in the far distance while she waited to board the bus, causing the sky to be blanketed in a cascading orange to purple hue. She was reminded of the early mornings when she ventured to the field behind their house to add a couple more dollars to her growing stash among the roots of the wild flowers. She smiled at the thought.