Black Coffee

I’m proud of being a pretty sophisticated little bitch. So why does one episode make me feel like I’m a fresh-faced farm girl in the city for the first time? It makes me realize just how culturally isolated Seattle really is. Except in music.

Noon

I got up at 8:00 this morning and it still felt like 5:00. I checked my hair and makeup and dressed carefully. Nothing was amiss. Mrs. Teasley had breakfast ready when I went downstairs. Southern hospitality is delicious—a huge rasher of bacon, basted eggs that barely had the white cover the yolk and grits with a big pat of butter melting in the middle of them. Mrs. Teasley suggested that I try them with a little salt and pepper, or break my egg yolk and sop it up with the grits. Maybe the best thing was the fresh loaf of bread that was still so hot it was hard for her to cut. And the real butter was a treat. I usually content myself with a smear of omega 3 margarine. I could almost feel my arteries harden. Yum! If the coffee was a little watery, so what. I could last another two days.

I spent some time after I got in bed last night and a little more after breakfast this morning going over a few journals and photo albums I found in Georgia’s room. I stuck them in my bag thinking that I’d slip out with them and only show them to Grover if they were significant to him. Mostly they had little meaning other than tracking a course through the woman’s pretty mundane life. I was looking for pictures of people who were close to Georgia. I found two things.

First, one of the journals was filled with bad poetry, apparently the work of Georgia herself. They might have been from any age. The wide loopy handwriting at the beginning of the journal—“I love Bob and I’ll be his girl, he’s the hottest redneck in the whole damn world”—definitely spoke of a teenager. But some of the later entries in the journal were a tighter, more reserved version of the same handwriting, schooled by age and experience. One poem stuck out from all the rest, just a few lines that read “I’m coming back to live on Duffy Lane. I’ll cry my tears and face my shame, and outlive everyone who remembers me, and be the one who tells all that she sees.” The rhymes were a little weak, but what struck me was the determination to return to Duffy Lane and outlive everyone she knew. That didn’t sound like the writing of a potential suicide. Of course, things change and I didn’t know how long ago this was written. I got to wondering whether if she really did plan to move back here like her father said. The area is beautiful and I’ve got a feeling that if you lived here very long, you’d never really want to leave.

The other thing, of course, was a picture of two girls in prom dresses. It was labeled in neat printing “Clarice and me—best friends. Waiting for our dates for our Christmas Cotillion.” I wasn’t exactly sure which girl was which. I’d seen several pictures of Georgia, but it’s always difficult to match the adult woman with the teenager, especially with their hair done up like that. I called Grover and asked if he knew who Clarice was and he said she’d married Jim O’Henry, but Jim was killed in action in the first Gulf War. He didn’t know if she’d remarried after that. Yes, and she and Georgia had been friends for years. It was Clarice who had the séance in the attic.

I did a quick Internet search to see if I could find a name and address and sure enough a Clarice O’Henry came up, still living in Savannah. The place wasn’t that far away according to the map that White Pages On-Line kindly linked me to. By that time, my Yellow Cab that I requested when I got up had arrived and I jumped in and gave him the address I wanted. He dropped me off in front of a strip mall next to a pretty busy street. I cross-checked my addresses and realized that he’d dropped me on the opposite side of Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard. I was about to head toward the intersection when I saw a little slice of heaven: Black Coffee. It was a little drive-through coffee stand in the parking lot of the strip mall. Savannah had espresso! Who knew?

I walked up to the drive-through window, but I didn’t see anyone there. “Hello?” I said.

“Mornin’ sista,” a voice said. Oh my. I wasn’t looking into the black void of the inside of the shop, I was looking at the black chest of the very, very big barista. He was at least six-ten. He was wearing what I thought at first was a black tank top, but proved to be a black dress shirt from which he’d torn the sleeves. His arms were as big around as my head, I swear. Seattle simply does not prepare you for this. The last black man I’d seen in Seattle was on the basketball court Friday night. Of course I’d already registered the vastly more homogenized culture of Savannah, but this was the first time I’d had a direct interaction with a man of this stature in longer than I could remember.

“Hi,” I said at last. “I’d like a double short Americano, please.”

“What’s that?” Well, I do know that not everyplace in the world speaks Seattle coffee. No problem.

“Two shots of espresso in an 8 oz cup filled with hot water,” I explained.

“No espresso, sista,” he said. “You want something uptown, like the Bean. I jus’ got coffee.”

“Oh.” Did I want another cup of weak coffee? It seemed a little rude to walk away without buying. “Just a cup of coffee then, thanks.” He set a styrofoam cup on the counter and opened a jar. He pulled out a tablespoon and dipped a heaping spoonful of crystals into the cup. Then another.

“You like it black, sista?” he said.

“Yes, thank you,” I answered. He scooped a third tablespoon of coffee crystals into the cup, then poured water from a kettle boiling on a hotplate beside him.

“We get along jus’ fine then,” he said as he used the same spoon to stir the coffee. “I like it white.” I reached for the cup and then looked up at him. He had a grin on his face a mile wide. White?

“I… um… meant the coffee,” I stammered. “Like the sign says—Black Coffee.”

“Huh?” he said as if he didn’t know the name of his own coffee shop. He leaned out of the window and twisted around to look at the sign above his window, then twisted back to look at my feet. “Ah, fu’. Hand me that, wouldya?” I looked down at my feet and realized I was standing on a plywood “S” that had apparently fallen from his sign. I handed it to him and he held it up and I saw he had a nail and hammer from behind the bar. The nail was about three inches long and he pounded it through the letter into the sign. In the process, the “o” fell out of the “Coffee.” I handed that to him and he produced another long nail. By the time he was finished, he’d rehung three letters. I looked and could see it clearly said Black’s Coffee.

“Thas more like it,” he said. “My name on my store. Took me ten mon’s ta git this permit. Ain’ nobody gonna take it away.”

“Your name is Black?”

“Black Friday,” he answered. “My mama say it was a black day when she gave birth to me.” He laughed and against my better judgment, I took a sip of the coffee. It actually wasn’t bad. Maybe the problem with instant coffee is that they serve it in little packets and think that will make a whole cup. There had to be the equivalent of between six and ten of those packets in this coffee.

“This is the best coffee I’ve had since I got to Savannah,” I said looking at him. He grinned broadly again.

“Secret is you gotta stip it. Can’ jus’ mix it and drink it. We fixt the sign while you coffee stipped. Now it jus’ right.” I sipped a little more. “You not from aroun’ here, are you?”

“No…” I almost said I was from Seattle. “I’m from Cleveland.”

“Yeah, might know. You wanna be over on that side of MLK. It get pretty rough pretty fast over here. Nice white ladies, they don’t come here unless they slummin’.”

“Thanks for the warning,” I said. “But I wouldn’t have missed this cup of coffee for the world.” He grinned again.

“You like that, you come to my place and I’ll fix you right fine. Coffee ain’ all Black’s got.” I know he intended that to be a double entendre.

“Just the coffee for me, Mr. Friday,” I said. “But I might come back for another cup of that before I leave Savannah. How much?”

“Two dollah fitty cents.” I gave him a five.

“Keep the change, Mr. Friday. You made my day.”

“Mmmm-mmmm. Gotta say the same Miss Cleveland. You come back, y’hear?”

I made it across the crosswalk without getting killed on the MLK and wandered up the block to the number I had for Clarice O’Henry. I rang the bell and heard a small dog being shushed as the bolt was being drawn. A woman with skin so fair that I would have sworn she’d lived indoors all her life answered the door. I was sure she was my—Peg’s—age, but there was scarcely a wrinkle on her face. She looked at me a little curiously at first.

“You aren’t the woman from The Maids, are you?” she asked.

“No ma’am,” I answered. I put on my very friendliest demeanor and set out to charm this southern charmer. “I’m, well I don’t suppose you remember, I scarcely remember myself it was so long ago. We met when we were maybe 8 or 10 years old. I’m Georgia McFearin’s cousin, Peg Chester.”

“Peg Chester? No I don’t recall,” she said. I thought for a moment she was going to close the door on me, then she said, “No wait. That was the summer I got so sick I couldn’t go outside and Georgia brought her little cousin over but we had to stay on opposite sides of the screen door while we played with Barbie dolls.”

Danger Will Robinson! Danger! You have to watch for a play like this. If you enthusiastically suddenly remember all that she is telling you, she could turn right around and say something like “I never had a Barbie doll.” Even if she was reciting a genuine event, if I played into it, someplace along the line she’d trip me up.

“I’m sorry, but I really don’t remember much about that summer. I’m two years younger than Georgia most of my memories are the things my mother repeated to me. She and Alice, Georgia’s mom, had a falling out after the divorce and we never came back to Savannah. Georgia and I connected again after college and I always exchanged cards with Grover over the years. I guess that’s why he called me to help settle her estate.”

“Her estate?” Clarice asked surprised.

“Oh no! You didn’t know!” I said. “I know Chester posted a notice in the Morning News. I just assumed you’d heard. Georgia passed away on Christmas Day.”

“I thought she’d gone to Seattle,” Clarice said as if the two events were mutually exclusive.

“She did,” I said. “I came here to talk to Grover and am headed to Seattle in the next couple of days. I was going through some of Georgia’s things and came across this picture of the two of you at the Cotillion and thought you might want to have it.” I reached in my bag, recovered the photo, and then held it out to Clarice. Clarice took the photo and backed into the house motioning me to follow her. A picture will open a door faster than a thousand words.

Before long, Clarice were sitting at her kitchen table with cups of tea (the tea here is much better than the coffee). She was retelling story after story as I produced more and more photos.

“I couldn’t believe Georgia never married,” I said confidentially. “I thought I was going to be the only old maid in the family.”

“Oh you know,” Clarice said confidentially, “her reputation didn’t help.”

“Really? Don’t tell me Georgia wasn’t as stellar as Grover always made her out to be!”

“Sweetheart, none of us were as stellar as Grover wants to believe. He got the ‘see no evil’ part of the saying down pat.”

“Tell me.” I was beginning to realize that older women gossip with the same fervor that young women do. The tell-tale signs in the way Clarice held her cup in both hands and leaned forward over it were exactly what I’d expect my friends to do in Seattle. She was about to dish the dirt.

“We were all a little wild in those days,” Clarice said, confidentially. “Even I had to try marijuana. And as to boys, well… You know the old adage: Don’t buy a pair of shoes before you try them on? When I thought I had the right man, I tried him on for size and we got married just a few weeks after I found out I was pregnant. But Georgia… Well, no one wants to buy a pair of shoes everyone in town has tried on.”

“No!” I said, genuinely shocked. She was telling me Georgia was a tramp.

“Every girl I know asked her fiancé if he had slept with Georgia. You know, they say when you sleep with a man you sleep with everyone he’s ever slept with. By that account, most of the women I know slept with each other, and so did their husbands. It was a time when we were all up in arms about discrimination and Georgia was the most non-discriminating person I ever met.” Clarice stopped long enough to take a sip of tea and recollect herself. “Well,” she said, “it’s not fitting to speak ill of the dead. I haven’t spoken to Georgia in a long time, but I’m still sad she’s dead.”

“I just wanted to know if you’d like the photo as a bit of a keepsake,” I said. “It’s so hard to decide what to do with some of her things.”

“Thank you, Peg,” she said. “I’ll tell you what I would like should you come across it.” She pushed the Cotillion photo back across the table to me. “See that necklace Georgia is wearing? I loaned it to her. It is an amethyst, square-cut, and set in a gold filigree. My mother had a fit when she found out I’d loaned it to Georgia. It isn’t particularly valuable, but it was my grandmother’s. Georgia never got around to returning it after the dance and made up an excuse about having misplaced it. But I saw her wear it years later and just couldn’t face confronting her. She probably forgot where she got it, but I’d still like to have it back if you should come across it.”

“Oh, certainly,” I said. “I haven’t seen it in her things here, but perhaps I’ll find it in Seattle.”

I understood that with that our tea time was over. I excused myself and stepped around the corner from the house to call a cab. It was there in five minutes. It appears there are layers to Georgia that I haven’t uncovered yet. I looked up as I was getting into the cab and could see Black Friday standing outside his coffee hut smoking a cigarette and looking at me. I waved and got in the cab.