The Evolution of Calpurnia Tate

Chapter 4 VIOLA

IF I’D BEEN PAYING attention, I might have noticed that Viola gave me a funny look whenever I headed out the back door to Granddaddy’s laboratory. Viola had been with us forever—since even before Harry was born—ringing her handbell at the back door to signal to those working outside to come to dinner and then banging a small brass gong at the foot of the stairs (which Mother thought more genteel inside) to signal those of us upstairs in our rooms. Mother would have liked her to use the gong outside as well, but with my brothers and me scattered from the gin to the river, we would never have heard it. And we were expected to be on time for dinner, washed and brushed, or else.

I had never thought about where Viola came from; she had always simply been there, punching down dough, peeling apples, preparing huge roasts in winter and frying up mountains of chicken in summer. No one, not even Mother, crossed her in the duchy of her kitchen. In between meals, she could be found inspecting the hens or the hogs or the vegetable patch to see what was next on the menu, or sitting at the kitchen table with a chipped mug of coffee at her elbow, resting up before the next mammoth meal.

She must have been somewhere in her forties. She was handsome, wiry, always wearing a wash-print dress and long apron, a clean kerchief binding her hair. She was slender but had a surprisingly powerful grip when she grabbed your arm to force your attention. She lived by herself in the old slave quarters out past Granddaddy’s laboratory, and though it had once housed a dozen or so slaves, it was the perfect size for one person. At some point a bare plank floor had been installed over the packed dirt. She had a woodstove for winter and a zinc sink with her own pump.

Viola’s skin was no darker than mine at the end of summer, although she was careful to stay out of the sun, while I didn’t care. She was only one fourth Negro, but that made her the same as full-blooded. I guess she could have “passed” in Austin, but that was a terribly risky business. If the passer was unmasked, it could result in a beating or jail or even worse. An octoroon woman in Bastrop had passed and married a white farmer. Three years later, he discovered her birth certificate in a trunk and pitch-forked her to death. He only served ten months in the county jail.

Viola and my mother had an easy relationship, and I never saw any high-handedness between them. I think Mother truly did appreciate the enormity of cooking three times a day for so many hungry boys and knew that our family ship would sink without her services. The swinging door between the kitchen and dining room was left open, except when we had dinner guests. Passing by, you could gauge the progress of the next meal—and Viola’s temper—by the level of pot noise.

Sometimes the two of them sat together in the kitchen to discuss meals and go over the household accounts. Mother made sure that Viola got nice new lengths of cotton in the summer and flannel in the winter, along with her weekly wages. Mother also shared old copies of Ladies’ Home Journal with her, and although Viola couldn’t read, she enjoyed paging through them and exclaiming over the latest outrageous fashions from Paris. For her birthday, she got a silver dollar; at Christmas, she got a gift of snuff. Viola didn’t take snuff often, but she needed a generous dip before making her magnificent lemon meringue pie, a marvel of tart lemon custard and towering egg whites that she whipped into existence with her wooden spoon in an agonizing ten-minute exercise that left her panting and exhausted. Every time I saw her taking snuff, she said to me, “Girl, it’s a filthy habit. You take it up, and I’ll have your hide.” It’s the only time she ever threatened me, and generally we got along fine, but not as well as she and Harry. Harry had always been her special boy, what with him being so handsome and charming and all.

Her other preferred companion was Idabelle, the one Inside Cat, whose tour of duty included the kitchen, the pantry, and the laundry, and whose commission it was to keep mice out of the flour bin. Viola doted on her, which was odd since she barely tolerated the other cats—the Outside Cats—and sometimes swept them off the back porch with her broom. Idabelle was a fat, calm tabby who was good at her job, and although she had her own basket in a corner next to the stove, she sometimes wandered upstairs to sleep on your pillow and curled around your head like a purring fur hat. This was wonderful in winter but unbearable in summer. She often got chucked outdoors in summer, much to the smirking satisfaction of the Outside Cats.

The Outside Dogs could usually be found either sprawled on the front porch or else penned up next to the barn, depending on how great a nuisance they were making of themselves on any given day. Ajax, their leader, always pleasantly exhausted with his lot, dozed his days away on the porch, occasionally stirring himself from his dreams to nibble a flea before flopping back down again with a heavy sigh of happiness. I liked to think that he dreamed of ducks and doves, waiting for hunting season, when he would spring into action and work hard for a couple of weeks like, well, a dog.

Ajax had another reason to be happy with his lot. Of all the dogs, he was the only Inside Dog. The others, Homer, Hero, and Zeus, were strictly Outside Dogs. They all knew this, but it didn’t stop them from good-naturedly crowding the front door every time it opened, every single time, despite the fact that they were never—ever—let into the house. I loved this particularly fine thing about the dogs: Despite a lifetime of denied entrance, hope never died in their hearts.

No doubt the Outside Dogs thought Ajax lived the life of a pampered lapdog once he made it through the magic door. They didn’t understand that on those infrequent occasions when he was deemed clean enough, dry enough, and flea-free enough to come into the house, he was confined to a corner of the front hall and was forbidden to enter the parlor or go upstairs. Still, there was a clear pecking order based on this accommodation, and he lorded it over the others. The dogs were all a peaceful and tolerant bunch (Father wouldn’t have kept them about the place if they were not), and my younger brothers could crawl all over them as long as they didn’t pull their ears too hard. When that did happen, they—the dogs—sheepishly excused themselves from the scene and slunk out of reach under the porch. Sometimes they nosed around the laboratory, and although Granddaddy seemed fond of them, he never let them in. Come to think of it, he didn’t let any humans in either, except for me.