Fee’s hands worked rhythmically, the rolling pin creaking from the force of her strokes. The dough spread quickly into a smooth circle. “Who be telling they no, huh?”
She wiped her hands on her apron before spooning chopped rhubarb into the piedish and deftly unfolding the top crust over it.
What Julia had witnessed that afternoon had to be illegal. It was certainly a travesty. But Fee was right: Who be telling they no? The police? Hardly. Kessler’s anger at her objections still rang in Julia’s ears. A politician? Ensconced in their own bureaucratic fortresses, they were even less concerned than the police. A judge or lawyer? For a significant fee, perhaps.
It was a brutal question, both in the abstract and in practice. If she protested, who would listen? Like Kessler, most authorities would dismiss her as yet another dewy-eyed female sheltered from the ways of the world. Christophine’s words, and what Julia had now seen for herself, shook her blithe confidence that the law in action much resembled the law in principle.
Christophine pinched together the two crusts rimming the pie and forked a pinwheel pattern across the top. She moved it to the counter, wiped the table with a folded rag, and began to scrub potatoes.
Abruptly, her hands stopped moving, and her chin came up.
Julia let go of the spoon. “What?”
Fee gave her head a small shake but didn’t answer.
Julia moved closer and brushed her forearm. “Tell me.”
“Bernice.” Fee’s voice had gone small.
Bernice. The name dislodged something inside Julia. It rose like a fist to her sternum. It was the same tight pain that had swelled in her chest yesterday, as if hatched under Philip’s gaze, when he’d asked why she felt so compelled to help Eva. Bernice. The day she’d first felt that stiff, suffocating fear.
It had been some twenty years ago. She’d been very young, no more than five or six. She’d been in the park. Christophine had sat on a bench with her friend Bernice, the only other colored nanny. Julia had been peevish that day, sulky at being forced to put on her ugly boots and go outside. She’d been standing near a knot of rowdy children she didn’t know, watching them tussle. A fight broke out, and one of the boys pushed the littlest girl, grabbing her hat. Its chin strap caught on her coat button, briefly choking her, and the girl shrieked. When her nanny—Bernice—ran to her and retrieved the hat from the boy’s fists, he too started to scream. Another nanny, tall and fierce, swept in to comfort him. With a piercing Irish brogue she berated Bernice and slapped her hard across the face. Before the startled woman could react, the angry nanny grabbed her arm and pulled her toward the benches, shouting for the police.
Julia watched stupidly as the boy wailed ever louder, insisting Bernice had attacked him. A policeman came running, and soon he dragged her away, despite her frantic protests. Everyone had seen what happened, but no one said a single word in the innocent woman’s defense. Julia had felt Christophine gripping her from behind, forbidding her to make a sound. “Nothing we can do,” Christophine had hissed into her ear, voice prickly with fear. She was only nineteen or twenty herself.
When the others had all whisked away their charges, Christophine corralled the hatless little girl, rigid and dry eyed with alarm, and the three of them hurried out of the park in a tight, stumbling huddle. Julia didn’t remember where they’d taken the little girl, whom she’d never seen again, and they had never spoken of it again. Until now.
“Bernice be from Jamaica,” Fee said. “Them white gals be vex with we, think we take they jobs. I never see she again after that.”
The recollection flooded Julia. She remembered the children’s cries and that tall nanny’s powerful slap. In breathless silence she remembered the strange brew of confusion, fear, and shame that had filled her throat. It wasn’t the child’s accusation but the onlookers’ silence that had betrayed poor innocent Bernice.
Fresh fear squeezed Julia’s chest as she thought of Eva. Fear that Eva’s innocence wouldn’t matter. That even if she swore she hadn’t killed Timson, the police wouldn’t listen. Speaking was one thing; being heard was another. Fear that unless others spoke up too, insisting on better answers, Eva’s fate was already sealed.
“Yesterday,” Julia said, nearly into Christophine’s ear. They were leaning into each other, almost as they had been on that terrible day. “When I heard about Eva, something started to hurt. It was the same pain I felt when we watched Bernice being taken away. I couldn’t remember where the feeling came from, but it was that fear of watching her go. How not one person told the policeman what really happened. I knew, but they wouldn’t have listened to me. I was just a child—” Julia stopped. The accusing boy had not been much older than she had been. If his word had carried weight, hers might have counted for something too. She felt sick to think maybe her silence had not been as powerless as she had thought. She’d been one of those silent onlookers, standing by and doing nothing, as if she’d had no choice. But there had been a choice then, and there was a choice now, with Eva. There was always a choice.
“You were terrified too, Fee,” she said. “Why? You know my mother would never let them cause you any trouble.”
Fee swallowed and gave Julia’s hand an excruciating squeeze. For a small woman she was ferociously strong. She began to peel the potatoes, long brown strips curling into the sink. “Maybe yes, maybe no. That day I pray so hard no one rough me too, say I hurt you like they say Bernice hurt that white child. Even your good mam not be standing up to
