By the Rivers of Babylon

BY THE RIVERS OF BABYLONMary Glickman For the musicians of Charleston, who inspire and sustain me 1.Ella Price raised her eyes to heaven and begged deliverance. It was a hot South Carolina day at the end of June 1997, the kind tourists love and natives abhor. She was stuck on the approach to Fenton Bridge after a long trip upstate to buy belts and handbags for her dress shop. All the way home, she’d thought how grand it would be to sit on her back porch and revel in the caress of a cooling island breeze. Now, she wondered if she’d ever get there.She studied what she could see of the drawbridge ahead. It had been locked straight up and open for the last twenty minutes, with no repair vehicles in sight. Experience taught that she might be trapped for an hour or more, so she turned off her engine to save gasoline. The papers said the new suspension bridge would be completed by the millennium, but that was three years away. Even though building the new bridge would bulldoze poor folks’ homes on either side of the river, at this moment Ella had to think it would be a good thing.She rolled down her window. The air was heavy and still. The river sparkled in the sun. People left their cars for relief, and she did, too. Looking around, she saw Roland Fenton, a dapper Black man thirty years of age, a restaurant manager whose family had once been owned by the Confederate general for whom the drawbridge had been named in ’47, fifty years ago. Ella Price was born Ella Sassaport, a surname her people acquired from their owners as well. She’d gone to grade school with Roland’s mama back in segregation days. The two waved and made faces of misery at each other.A slender, young white man standing three cars between them mistook her gesture for one aimed at him. His long, thin face arranged its features into a similar expression of distress, then smiled. Raised to be polite, Ella smiled back. A young woman exited his car. She was a remarkable creature, fulfilling every criteria for beauty the entire white world held dear: unmarred porcelain skin, deep blue eyes, chiseled cheeks and jaw, an admirable nose, sumptuous lips. Her hair was black and thick; her legs, long and shapely; her belly, flat; and her bust, high and generous. She dashed through the line of stopped cars to the railings at the foot of the bridge, bending over the uppermost to regard the river below. Drivers all around stared as she did.Sirens wailed. Repair trucks with a police escort at the bottom of the bridge threaded through stalled traffic to make their way slowly to the engineer’s booth. People reentered their cars and revved them up to try to give the trucks a path. The young man called out to his beauty, “Abigail, come here!” She ignored him. Drivers behind him leaned on their horns. “Abigail!” She remained where she was. “Abigail! We’ve got to move!” At last she became aware that there were other people on earth besides herself. She turned and dashed back to the car, making adorable gestures of apology to everyone. The young man circled around his hood to stand by and open her door, helping her in, then fastening her seat belt for her as if she were a child. Ella thought it an odd thing to do when people were waiting for them to move. The woman wasn’t disabled—her scampering about proved that—she was certainly capable of strapping herself in. Then it struck her that the young man’s tender care was proprietary, that he did it to reclaim her, to snatch her back from every man who’d stared at her.Young love, Ella thought, shaking her head. How it ties us up and ties us down. How it burns and flares, dies down, then flares up again. She’d been no less a beauty in her youth than that woman. Now that she was middle-aged, people called her a handsome woman, as Black and beautiful as her noble African ancestors. She hoped she’d grown wiser over the years, but she’d been a fool for love plenty in her day. She could spot a fellow traveler miles off. As the young man’s car inched closer to her own, she saw it was from Massachusetts. It was packed high with suitcases and odd, unpackable items: a wicker chair, a laundry basket full of folded towels. So they were moving to Sweetgrass Island. Something in her laughed at the idea, but it was a rueful laugh. That Abigail’s going to cause some kind of trouble on Sweetgrass, she thought. Lord help us all when the island men catch a look of her. My, oh my. Just wait.It wasn’t much of a wait. The island men got wind of Abigail Becker soon enough. By the time she and her man made their social debut at Declan’s Pub ten days later, she’d already been the topic of speculation at Harold’s Stop and Go and at the fire station. After that evening, even those who hadn’t been there had heard of the beauty from Boston.When Abigail walked into the pub, it was early, just after six o’clock. Whoever walked into Declan’s at that hour was treated the same by the crowd gathering within. All eyes turned toward the door, the way a swarm of honeybees turn toward a bank of flowers, with curiosity and without malice. Each one hoped a friend had walked through the door and not some stranger; a tourist slumming it with the locals, or a resident of one of the new gated communities eating up the island’s farmland. Early evening was the hopeful part of the night, when alliances were forged or reawakened. By nine o’clock, nobody gave a damn. Patrons had either hooked up with their buddies, or not. By ten o’clock, they were one breathing mass of fellowship. They bought each other pints