The Garden of Eden

She scooped up the caterpillar from the hard dirt path in the park. The path snaked around a pond where gray goslings swam with their mothers, still fat in their coats of down. There must have been hundreds of exhausted caterpillars lying there, barely moving, or not moving at all. The wind, she said, must have blown them from the large sycamore trees, rows of which canopied the path on up to the covered bridge and down past until they turned into pines and elms where the public park morphed into an oblivion of woods where someone could get lost if they wanted to.

She cupped the fuzzy critter in the palm of her gentle brown hand and smiled upon it with such radiance that made Jem smile, too. She petted it with the gentle stroke of a soft finger. He looked at her, stared at her reverently. He was frozen in his footsteps for fear of stepping on one of them which would certainly distress her. Carefully, she stepped to the side where she let the caterpillar go in the tall grass that was peppered brightly with light-purple wildflowers, coneflowers, mostly. Jem didn’t know much about flowers or grass. Only what Dori had taught him. He had no hope of knowing their scientific names, which she said was often derived from Latin. 

“Latin,” he balked. “I ken barely speak English, let alone Latin.” She laughed. He always made her laugh whether he meant to or not.

He also frustrated her, like when he asked her why bother saving one when you can’t save them all. She frowned at him and quickly scooped up another. It was more a look of disappointment in his lack of apparent humanity, or because of her own overabundance. He was just raised that way. Not to care for bugs or anything smaller than him. Not to see what they become, or to be interested in what they can do. Not to appreciate a unified blue sky, or anything not made, or at least, not made by his God. 

A picnic basket sat in his restless hand and slid down his clammy palm and to his fingers until he regripped it. He was hungry and his palms were sweaty. It was a hundred and two in the sun and didn’t feel much cooler in the shade. Not even with the breeze. But in the sanctuary of the woods, it would be cooler. It was always cooler. 

“Jem Dunleavy! I swear I taught you nothin’ this entire year past!” she cried excitedly, though restrained in a motherly-sort-of-way, as though she might disturb the caterpillar in her palm if she struck a certain decibel. She shook her head and then continued with her work ferrying one caterpillar at a time to the safety of the yellow Indiangrass, or the sorghastrum nutans, she would say. 

He stood still in the minefield of all those future butterflies. His stomach grumbled for fried chicken and a trickle of sweat stung his eye which he pawed at with his free hand. Thinking better of it, he carefully sat the picnic basket down and slowly stepped outside of the area, one careful step at a time. And from a safe spot, he bent down and scooped one of the caterpillars up, which was more difficult than he thought it would be. It wiggled and curled up into a ball as though his hand were some sort of large carnivorous pale spider, or as though it didn’t want to be saved. Dumb bug, he thought. He didn’t share what he was thinking. She smiled, looking over at him. 

“Imagine what beauty you are contributing to the world if you save just one, Jem,” Dori implored.

He smiled back. Not thinking anything of butterflies, or caterpillars, at all. He could care less about them and his imagination wasn’t that great. But he smiled still looking at her, appreciating her enthusiasm for caring to save something so minuscule. And since he realized that he would be standing there for a while if he didn’t, he joined her. He saved one, then two, then a third, and he and Dori continued until all that remained on the path was their picnic basket and a couple leaves and molted sheets of a sycamore bark. Dori then transferred the dead ones that other people had already trampled as though some Jesus caterpillar might revive them like Lazarus.

Never in a million years would Jem Dunleavy have thought that he would be clearing caterpillars out of a walking path in a park in Decatur, Georgia with a colored girl who he was madly in love with. But such as it was, never in a million years would he want to be doing anything anywhere else. They met in this park the year before and have been inseparable since. The park was one of the only non-segregated places where such an unlikely meeting of opposites could occur in Georgia in 1942. And even though it wasn’t segregated by either signs or law, it was by the ostracization of looks and that living dead corpse of custom. “Tradition” or “values,” they called them on Sundays in hot white churches, or at dinner tables over the rolls. Resistance. “It just ain’t right,” he heard them say. Mixin’ the races like. Coloreds in a white pool. They got theirs and we got ours. Sometimes they replaced “right” with “natural.” Jem had never given it much thought. It was just the way it was.

When they met, they smiled as they passed each other, and as they walked on they both looked back. Dori offered the first meek but daring word, “Hello.” And Jem followed with a just as meek hello of his own. He asked her what she was doing and she said she was just walkin’ and he said he was just walkin’ too and so they agreed to walk together. They sat by the pond and she taught him about flowers and grass and he taught her how to fold a paperboat with sheets from a wad of paper he had stuffed in his back jeans pocket. 

They talked for what seemed like hours and every so often folks walked by and their necks bent this way and that and their heads turned and they gave the young couple the looks they have since grown accustomed to. Never could I have thought that eyes could look so mean, Jem confessed to Dori. And Dori said them eyes are only mean when you let them be mean, which baffled Jem, but he said no more of it. He wondered if he had them eyes once, though ashamedly he knew he had. Not as a child, but as a young man of fourteen or fifteen, seeing a black man whose face he just couldn’t forget wearing a Georgia necktie in a mulberry tree.
 
“I wish we were Adam and Eve. Then there’d be no one to look,” Jem said.

“Our Garden of Eden must be a state of mind,” she offered.

“It ain’t always gonna be this way.”

“No. It sure ain’t,” she agreed. 

Jem had never in seventeen years had a girl of his own. Not in any sort of way. Though handsome and polite, he had never felt connected to anyone but a school teacher once, and the impropriety of that kept it what it was. Never to be. Girls he knew liked tall or athletic boys, and he wasn’t either. He was shy, and though from an affluent family, he was not a social creature and he often shirked the responsibilities of a teenage boy at a dinner party. His father was the mayor of Decatur, a practicing lawyer who was known as a stern Christian conservative with aspirations to be governor someday. Politics bored Jem. And so did talks of values.

He was taken immediately by her. Put in a napkin and stuffed in her dress pocket. He felt as though he was hit by the suddenness of a storm that wouldn’t relent. But he balked at his own metaphor for comparing her to a storm before he understood better that she was the sunlight that comes after the storm, and the storm had been his unwitting change. The breaking of his ingrained socialization, those “values” and “customs” that had been bled into him from generations of mental beatings. 

Not only was she the most beautiful woman in Decatur, or the county, she was indeed the sweetest, as well. He would learn so that day as they talked until nearly dark by the pond near the cattails when they both were supposed to be home long before. She had the heart of an old woman and the figure of Venus, he wrote that night in deliberate letters that formed only after much thought. But nothing he wrote sounded good, so he scrapped it. He could copy something out of a book. Shakespeare, maybe. But he knew she read every book there was to read so he didn’t want to appear to be a phony. 

Jem quickly learned that night in the drafting of his first ever “love letter” that he was too poor a writer to put into words Dori’s beauty. But as he lay in bed in the dark room he thought of it and jumped up to write his sudden realization. She was simply too beautiful to be turnt to words and it was not a measure of his lack of talent, rather a testament to the abundance of her beauty. He felt smart using the words “testament” and “rather.” He wrote it down with a smile and put it in an envelope.

What a fool he looked like, he thought, walking that first letter to her house in his blue Sunday suit, his dress-shoed feet shuffling across the dirt sidewalk, holding a fistful of yellow daisies in one hand and the letter in the other. All them black faces turned to look at him as he walked down the street finding the little yellow house which was little more than a matchbox. The size of his family's gardening shed. He had asked Otis at the drugstore, who told him her address was 72 Paper Street. 

“The yella’ one wit’ the green roof dat got a cat on it e’ry time I see it, anyhow. There’s a tear in the screen door like a teardrop and there should be a porch wit’ an old lady on it. That’d be Dori’s ma-maw, Miss Maybelle. She has rheumatoid arthritis and the gout. Battle-axe ’til you get to know her, then she’s sweet as sugar.”

Otis didn’t have a hateful bone is his body, which was why Jem asked him if he knew where she lived. He was the town pharmacist. A short, thin, wiry man who made up for his frailty of appearance with a fierce and boisterous spirit. A bit of a kook whose peculiarities precluded any form of hate to live within his body, or to tolerate the importation of it into his mind by way of his ears, even in the subtlety of jest. Not one nigger joke would go uncontested with Otis and he would normally ridicule or rebuke the joker with a joke of his own upon the moronic nature of the bigot. 

“Ain’t a right color of skin, boy,” he told Jem before Jem headed out to deliver that first love letter and those flowers, “Only a wrong way of lookin’ at it. You got ya some good eyes in your head. That Dori is a most beautiful lady.”

So there 17-year-old Jem Dunleavy stood, nervous as hell, trying to look the right sort of way, confident like, so that the eyeballs that were all over him might just roll away and let him be. But they kept looking at him like he was a ghost and he could only stand there as they did because it was too damn late to go back now. But to his relief, Dori came out through the screen door with the teardrop-shaped tear in it. It creaked open and slammed shut. He stood in her front lawn looking at the green roof and the black cat that was on it, who was staring at him, too. And the old woman with rheumatoid arthritis and the gout on the makeshift porch swing who had been giving him the evil eye, but who said nothing at all until she chided Dori for slamming the door. 

No one said nothing. But Dori smiled and greeted Jem and took the flowers and the letter and they have been inseparable since, choosing to go only places where they both could go, which typically meant the park to feed the ducks, or to hike the trails. Many nights Jem had gone to Dori’s house for supper. And he knew what Otis had said about Dori’s ma-maw being true. Sweet as sugar.

The war came in the newspapers first. Delivered in ink and paper in big bold letters. “Japan attacks Pearl Harbor!” one read. “War!!!” on another. Jem ignored it as long as he could, but he knew it wouldn’t go away. Later that night he lay in bed and thought of the impossibility of a future with her. The frustrating thought of what could never be, what was illegal, in fact. Marriage, children, it was all an impossibility unless the laws changed, and he knew the laws weren’t going to change. And he knew his father would never allow him to date anyone but one of the daughters of their social class. One of those snotty girls that come over for dinner parties and don’t say nothing to no one and who fold their napkins the right way and who never put their elbows on a table. The War, however horrible as it was, was his way out. It was his escape, he thought.  

Jem had a friend who worked at the movie theater who let them watch movies together after hours, or before hours. Early Sundays when everyone was in Church, or late when everyone was in bed. They ate all the stale popcorn they could eat and Jem paid the friend for the sodas, though he told Dori they were free so she would take a few home to her kid brother and ma-maw. Before every picture, Jem’s face was lit up by the images of tanks trudging forward through Africa, men marching through mud, and ships sailing black water he knew would be dark blue in real life. Dori looked at him and held his hand tighter as though to discourage him from the thoughts she knew that warred in his mind. Most of his classmates had already gone. Some had even been sent home in boxes.

The movie that played that evening was Irving Berlin’s Holiday Inn with Bing Crosby. Dori loved it because she loved musicals and the music was good. She followed Fred Astaire across the stage with her bright-white eyes and smiled. Jem caught glimpses of her now and then, glancing over. He looked around at the empty movie theatre and wondered what it would be like if they didn’t have to hide anymore. 

Not long after, in the Spring of 43, he signed up and joined the Army against Dori’s wishes. His father was proud. He would be even prouder if Jem died because having a son that died in war was another step closer to the governor’s mansion. Something to boast of in speeches or to put in fliers. Jem explained to Dori that he would have been drafted anyway, which was probably true. But he didn’t elaborate on the plan that swelled him up with optimism. Both he and Dori knew well the possibility of a future outside of the shadows of an empty movie theatre, or a public park, was bleak. But they didn’t speak with each other about it so not to ruin their time with worry. 


Jem came downstairs to dinner and sat at the table. It was one day before he was to be shipped off to training, and from there to wherever the war was. Everyone looked at him. His father looked at him and didn’t say anything for a while. His little brother and sister giggled until they realized they were giggling at the dinner table and they covered their mouths and looked at their father for forgiveness. It was an unusual sight, after all. The butler looked at him and had an empty expression, one of a perplexed anxiety. His mouth was open and he just stood there holding a silver platter with nothing on it.

“Jem, this some kind of joke?”

“No, father. It ain’t no joke.”

“You look like a damn fool. Mind tellin’ me what the hell you’s doin’? You lost your damn mind?” 

“This is how I feel. This is how I will be. I have one night before I go to war for my country, father. This is how I will spend it. As I wish. Like a colored. In a colored restaurant. In a colored hotel. In a colored movie theatre with colored folks. My folks. That’s where I want to be.”

His father laughed bitterly. “This must be some kind of joke.”

“No. It ain’t no joke, daddy. I am in love with a girl who happens to be colored. And so now I am colored, too. So I can see her like I ought to be able to see her. So I can take her out just one time like two people in love should be able to do.”

“The hell you are. The mayor’s son out in blackface with the darkies? Can you imagine? Tell him, Louis. Tell him how ridiculous it is.”

“It’s might ridiculous, Jem,” Louis the butler said on command, still holding that empty platter. Louis was colored. 

“See. Even Louis says it’s ridiculous. So go upstairs and wipe that shit off your face and come down more presentable.”

“I am leaving, father. And I ain’t coming back. If I make it through the war, I am taking Dori to Chicago so I can finish up school there. I ain’t staying in this godforsaken backwards state anymore, where people are divided up like cattle. Black, white. This for them, that for us. I ain’t having it no more. It ain't right.”

“Then you ain’t no son of mine.”

“I don’t think I ever was.”

“Your mother is rolling over in her grave.”

“Like hell she is.” Jem walked away and out the door. He walked to Dori’s house on Paper Street. He stood in the front yard looking like a lawn jockey without the lantern amid a chorus of crickets and frogs and he looked up at the porch where Dori’s ma-maw scowled back at him. Dori came out and smiled. She laughed. She was wiping her hands with a dish towel. 

“You lost, sir?” she joked.

“Abraham, Abraham!” he sang.

“You should leave the singin’ to the frogs.”

“Oh, come on! Let’s go, Dori! We got a town to paint.”

“Like that you ain’t.”

“Like hell we’re not.”

“Watch your tongue!” Dori’s ma-maw scolded.

“I’m sorry, ma’am.”

“I will get my sweater,” Dori smiled.

They drove to Atlanta in his red Mercury and patronized a few jazz clubs and had dinner in a colored restaurant. Best dinner I ever had, Jem said. Ain’t no doubt to it. They had drinks and danced until two. No one said a cross word to him and no white folks along the sidewalk noticed he was in disguise. He could pull it off pretty well with his short black hair, despite his bright blue eyes. The night went too fast, but not without all the flare of a meteor burning to Earth. 

They lay in bed in the hotel. Two separate beds. A Bible on the nightstand between them reminding them of the Garden of Eden. 

“Do you intend to make me an indecent woman tonight, Jem Dunleavy?”

“That isn’t possible.”

They lay there and stared up at the ceiling. “I want to make love to you, Dori, but there’s a chance I ain’t coming home. And if I can’t spend my life doing it, well, I don’t want to do it just once.”

“Don’t talk like that, Jem.” She wanted to jump in bed with him, but she didn’t. “You're coming home. Are you going to take your face off?”

He looked over at her, a lot drunk. He smiled. “In the morning. Maybe after breakfast. Maybe not at all. I feel better this way.”

“Are you going to make an indecent woman out of me?” she asked again. 

“No. I'm not. Will you marry me, Dori?”

Jem’s arm sprawled off the side of the bed and hung towards hers. He opened his hand and on his palm there was the ring. She lay on her side curled up looking at him. 

“Yes,” she said smiling holding back tears, taking the ring. “You goof!”

“That’s good,” he said. And then they fell asleep.

She saw him off at the train station. He had washed the blackface off and shaved. He looked nice in his suit, not appearing nervous at all. His father didn’t come. Dori wore the engagement ring, looking at it every chance she got. How it shined when the sun was in morning and at noon. Never in a million years would she have thought she would be standing at a train station in Atlanta wearing an engagement ring given to her by a white man who she loved very much. But be it as it was, never in a million years would she have wished she were anywhere else. 

She wore a yellow dress. The sun lit her like a bonfire. It didn’t matter anymore that people were staring, making snide comments under their insidious breath. He kissed her there in front of God and everyone and he wouldn’t have stopped kissing her had the whistle not blown and had the porter not called out that the train was departing.

He said last to her with a smile, “Horti nostri mentis status est. Te amo.” 

In her surprise, she was barely able to reply before he boarded. But she shouted to him, “Te quoque amo!” And he smiled at her through the window and waved before that train disappeared.

Four months later, Otis walked slowly to Paper Street carrying Maybelle’s prescriptions in a bag in one hand and a Western Union telegram in the other. He sat there on the porch practically all afternoon.

Dori wandered to the park holding the telegram and wearing the engagement ring. “Looks like it will be a long, long engagement for us, Jem,” she smiled. “But I'll be here waiting for you.”

She made a paperboat out of the telegram and christened it with a kiss. It shot out by fat goslings in coats of gray down. Then she walked the path to the covered bridge and out of the Indiangrass and the purple coneflowers, echinacea purpurea, arose a throng of butterflies that shot straight up and dissipated into the blue sky.