The Black Ribbon

I found this one hiding in my hard drive. Written circa 2008

“I made you a new housecoat, momma.” Eve holds out the garment.

“You may sew better than you clean my kitchen, but I don’t need a new housecoat.”

“You know Pastor Bob is visiting this morning.” Eve has rehearsed this part.  “Your purple housecoat is in the laundry.”

Edith fingers the white lace running down the front zipper, the black bows stitched at the neck.  Eve has counted on her mother’s lifelong weakness for bows.  She relents, and allows herself to be dressed.  While Eve styles the older woman’s stiff white curls, Edith prattles about election results.

“A Negro in office.  We’re a country of heathens.”

“Pastor Bob would say the Lord works in mysterious ways,” Eve murmurs boldly.

“Don’t be foolish, girl.  Saint Paul says, ‘What communion hath light with darkness?’  Darkness, Saint Paul says.”

Blue veins pop out of the crepe-paper skin on Eve’s hands.  “People are people, momma, no matter their skin color.”

“None of that.  Thought I cured you of that when that King man got shot.”

“That was forty years ago.”

“Don’t I know it,” her mother snaps.  “And we’re still no better off than to get a Negro president.”

April 4, 1968.  Edith had made Eve scrub the kitchen floor with Eve's own toothbrush for wearing a black armband after Martin Luther King’s assassination.   A ribbon, actually; one of Eve’s few hair decorations. 

A black ribbon that, forty years later, silently ties together the white lace of her mother's new housecoat.