The Queen of Palmyra by Minrose Gwin Page A

airy, with green leaves all aflutter, as if they were floating down from invisible trees. Zenie and Ray’s house was a Jim Walter Home. Her grandfather, Miss Josephine’s father, had owned the lot but the house on it was falling in, so, after her grandfather died, Zenie and Ray moved into the two good rooms in the old down-fallen house and started their project of saving money for a Jim Walter Home. Zenie stopped taking her midday dinner at the kitchen table after Mimi and Grandpops were done and the table was cleared. Instead she carried her dinner and part of Mimi and Grandpops’ supper home in a pie pan she brought back clean every morning; she and Ray made their night meal off of them. She put most of her money from working at Mimi and Grandpops’ and taking in sewing into a savings account at the Millwood Bank and Trust. Grandpops was on the board of trustees of the bank, so he took her down and told them to set it up forher and they gave her a little navy blue book so she could bring it in every time she put her money in. She spent time looking at the book, working and reworking the figures until the edges got to looking like an old Bible.
    It had all started when Zenie saw an advertisement for Jim Walter Homes in an old Ladies’ Home Journal of Mimi’s. She tore the page out, folded it up, and put in her purse. She took it out and looked at it again and again until the creases started to tear. PICTURE YOURSELF IN A LOVELY JIM WALTER HOME! ONLY PENNIES A DAY!
    She still had the faded ad, which featured a picture of a pretty little family with a mother and father and three children all decked out like it was Easter Sunday. The girls had on shiny patent-leather shoes. They were standing in the front yard of a spick-and-span Jim Walter Home with trees and flowers and a white fence. They were the happiest family on the face of the earth to have such a Lovely Home, one of four floor plans available. When I was younger, it made me sick just to look at those white folks, which was what I’d taken to calling people of my color who had things I didn’t have, such as a nice house they’d bought for themselves and pretty clothes. Back then, before Daddy found his calling as a policy man, even before we’d moved to our place behind Big Dan and Miss Kay Linda’s, we were on the other side of town in a crummy duplex one street over from Milltown. I walked on my heels in my Sunday shoes because they pinched my toes.
    Zenie said she couldn’t care less what color the folks in the picture were. She thought the Jim Walter houses were the be-all end-all. I had to admit they did look pretty with their green sides and window boxes with red geraniums lapping over. What she liked most about them, she told me, is that they looked new. “Everything top to bottom brand spanking new ,” she’d say, and the pennies in her eyes would glow.
    She and Ray needed a $300 down payment on the Cottage Style. Miss Josephine had given them half, and it had taken them two years to save the rest. Zenie had worked for Mimi six and a half days a week, coming in around 7:30 and leaving around 3 with a cold supper prepared in the refrigerator. A half day on Sunday, plus keeping me. Ray made good money. He worked from daylight to dark and sometimes, under a bare bulb in his shed, long into the night. He was a yardman in the warm weather and a handyman when it was cool, so some weeks were better than others. He could fix just about anything. People gave him their broken lamps, lawn mowers, radios, and all manner of stuff, and he bent over them like a genie in his little shed, making them good as new. Mimi paid Zenie $1.50 a day, or $10.00 a week (Mimi added in the extra quarter). Extra for holidays and canning. It was Grandpops’ idea to pay Zenie’s social security even though the law didn’t require it for maids then, and Mimi sometimes said that they had nothing to blame themselves for when it came to treatment of the Negroes. Plus she gave Zenie