“Actually, I was born in Georgia, but my parents took me North when I was only ten days old. It’s so different down here, isn’t it? Everything’s already in bloom. Up there, buds are barely starting to swell.”
Her car was a white Lexus and the passenger seat was littered with maps and folders and a couple of empty fast-food bags.
“Sorry about the mess,” Heather said. “Just throw all that stuff on the backseat.”
As I gathered up a handful, a glossy eight-by-ten sienna-toned photograph slid out of one folder. It showed three people in a workroom or studio. Sketches of furniture groupings covered the bulletin board behind the tilt-top drawing table. The central figure was a small, dark-haired woman, who’d half turned on her swivel stool and had one high-heeled foot extended as if she were about to stand. She wore black slacks, a short-sleeved black turtleneck, and what looked like an authentic Navajo squash blossom necklace of turquoise and silver.
She was laughing at the two men, who looked as if they could eat her with a spoon. The first was casually dressed and unfamiliar to me, but the man in a sports jacket and tie was a much younger Jay Patterson, unmistakable with his broad face, square jaw and bulbous nose. It took me half a minute longer to realize that the small stylish woman in this photograph was the same chiffon-draped Matilda McNeill Jernigan that we were on our way to meet at a homeless shelter.
“Dear Lord above!” I exclaimed. “If this is what Savannah looked like when she left, no wonder people didn’t immediately recognize her tonight.”
Heather took the photograph and slid it back into the folder. “I just hope she’ll talk to me. You were with her tonight. What’s she like?”
“Nothing like the reactions I’ve heard from people who knew her. I thought she was someone’s eccentric mother or grandmother. She talked about the Market, but anyone who lives in High Point could probably tell you the same things she told me. Do you specialize in furniture people up there in Massachusetts?”
“Not really,” she answered vaguely.
We had turned off Main and were now driving east on Kivett Drive. Heather, who’d been in town long enough to get her bearings, pointed out various buildings: “The Hamilton Square showrooms are over there and Hamilton Wrenn’s here, and down that way’s a building shaped like the world’s largest bureau if you’re into that sort of thing.”
“I’m more interested in shopping than doing the tourist bit,” I told her.
“All the same, you really ought to go by the Discovery Center and see how a furniture factory works if you’ve never been inside one,” she said. “It’s amazing to see how they set the knives for cutting legs and spindles when a piece is in production.”
She turned left on North Centennial Street and soon pulled into the parking lot beside a red brick building. Open stairs mounted to the second floor and several men lounged there under the security light to smoke their cigarettes, a mix of black and white, drably dressed, an air of defeat on most of them. And even though I’d never seen them before, they were familiar to me. I’d probably see some of these very men in court next week.
Their eyes sized us up as we approached and when I said, “Yolanda Jackson? The Father’s Table?” a couple of them gestured to the short flight of steps that led down to a metal door beneath the stairs.
The basement was built of cement blocks. Beyond a small vestibule were double glass doors that led into a large and surprisingly cheerful dining area. Although the ceiling was low, there was nothing cavelike about the room. Its block walls had been painted off-white and someone had done fool-the-eye paintings which gave the illusion of looking out wide windows into a vaguely Biblical landscape of calm green hills. Painted geraniums bloomed on the “window ledges” and green vines seemed to twine along the top.
The fifteen or twenty bleached-oak tables had matching chairs stacked upon them and an elderly white man was mopping the floor.
He gave us a smile as we came in, but kept mopping. Instead, we were greeted by a small, energetic woman of late middle age with flashing brown eyes, beautiful olive skin and short black hair that had a heavy dusting of gray. Her smile was warm and welcoming but with a touch of regret. “I’m sorry, but we’ve finished serving for the evening. If you’re hungry though, I could give you some bananas and maybe a peanut butter sandwich.”
“We’re not here to eat,” I said. “We’re just looking for Yolanda Jackson.”
If possible, her smile became even warmer. “I’m Yolanda. How can I help you?”
I introduced myself and Heather, then said, “A woman asked us to meet her here tonight. She’s wearing a dress that looks as if it’s made out of chiffon scarves. A Matilda McNeill Jernigan or maybe Louisa May Fern—”
“Savannah,” the woman interrupted.
“You know her?” asked Heather, surprised.
“Sure. She’s been coming to us since the end of January.”
“No, I mean, do you know who she really was?”
“I know who she
“Does she ever talk about it?” Heather asked eagerly.
The woman’s friendly smile faded.
“Why are you really here?” she asked us sharply. “What is Savannah to you?”
I explained about the mix-up in tote bags and Heather described the series of profiles she wanted to do on Market innovators.
“She may come. She may even bring back your bag. But talk about herself?” Yolanda Jackson gave a Latin shrug. “She doesn’t speak of her past life once. Not about the furniture part anyhow.”
“About other things?” asked Heather.
Yolanda gave her a slow, appraising look and her lively brown eyes narrowed. “That’s not for me to say. When people come here, I give them dignity and respect. What they tell me in confidence, I keep in confidence. And now I
