Priscilla

2. Not From ’Round These Parts

CHAPTER 2

Not From ’Round These Parts

Priscilla was in a fairly good mood as she headed home from church that next Sunday, only a few days after her encounter with the angry veteran in her American Politics class. As a lifelong member of the African Methodist Episcopal Zion denomination, she had asked some of her new colleagues whether there were any such churches in Tallahassee. They had told her there was one AME Church, Macedonia, but no AME Zion Churches. Close enough, she had thought. She had already determined that Sunday going-to-church visits would be one of her regular weekend rituals. As a preacher’s daughter, she and the rest of her family had rarely missed a Sunday in the pews. She had dressed this morning in one of her favorite tailored suits, the double-breasted black linen one with a fine white silk blouse that her mother had helped her choose at Prendergast’s finest ladies’ salon. No hat, of course. Priscilla went to church most Sundays, but she never had been and never would be one to wear a big floppy hat just to praise the Lord.

As she cruised along what she supposed was the way home in her sleek Mustang, Priscilla reckoned she already had set a pattern of a rather regimented life: campus, church and occasional visits to the shopping mall near her home. Nothing wrong with setting a positive ritual, she told herself. She meant to be a success, and her Daddy had always impressed upon her that a disciplined life was a successful life. She told herself she was already well on the way to doing just that. Finding a welcoming church community was certainly a step in the right direction. So far her experiences at her new church had been positive. Located near the university and close to downtown, the congregants were primarily professionals—college professors, and even a congressman. Every time she went, she was pleased to recognize a few faces she had seen around the campus. Then, this morning, when she lingered after the service, the pastor had told her that he had been a FAMU alumnus. He had even once been a drum major for the nationally acclaimed Marching One Hundred Band, which he said—with a pride that still resonated after all those years—had often been invited to participate in presidential inaugural parades in Washington, D.C.

Yet as she drove along, Priscilla, engrossed in remembering how at home she had felt at church, suddenly realized she was in a neighborhood wholly unfamiliar to her. Had she somehow missed her turn? She concentrated on getting her bearings. But just after crossing Miccosukee Boulevard, she noticed how seedy the houses and stores had become. This was a side of Tallahassee she had not seen before. Her own neighborhood, a new development on the outskirts of the city, seemed part of another world. She passed a large cinderblock apartment building with shattered windows and tattered clothes hanging from railings. Row upon row of identical, rectangular-shaped, bland-colored houses ran along the street. She wondered where the grass was, and thought: I could never live in a place like this!

She passed an unattractive sign in huge block letters that read: CHIPLEY SQUARE HOUSING PROJECT, and realized that back home there were no such “projects”. Nor had she ever known anyone who resided in such housing. Everybody she had ever really known lived in a house, a townhouse, an apartment complex or even a mansion—nothing government-owned. She recalled recent letters she had written to family and friends about the clusters of Spanish moss that dangled amid the dense woods near her home. No such scene in this neck of the woods.

Then another thought: I have no idea where I am.

She felt her blood pressure escalate. I’m lost! But at least it’s not at night!

As she drove, her eyes wandered off the road, looking for possible sources of help. People meandering down the sidewalk wore shorts, cut-off jeans, sandals or bare feet. A few women were clad in loose-fitting blouses and short skirts or shorts. Nobody was dressed up like she was, fresh from church. Priscilla saw several old cars that looked as if they had not been moved for a while, including a rusty black Cadillac without tires, mounted on blocks. She watched as an old Dodge van, filled with children, clattered past in the other lane. From her rearview mirror, she noticed plumes of gray smoke billowing from its tailpipe.

Then suddenly, as she was about to pass through the intersection at Chipley Square, she felt a massive crush against her left side. Instinctively, she covered her face. A moment later, she lost consciousness.

Later, when she read the police report, she learned that immediately after the collision, some people from the neighborhood had approached the crash. Two women who had witnessed the crash told police they had seen fumes rising from the Mustang’s floor. Since the driver’s side of the car had been severely damaged, the women had pulled open the passenger door. Then one of them—Monica Ratcliff, according to the police report—had climbed into the car, tossed out some of the broken glass through what had been the windshield and unlatched Priscilla’s seatbelt. Somehow she had managed to wedge herself behind the driver’s seat and lift Priscilla to the other seat. Since Priscilla was unconscious, Monica had needed her friend’s help in getting the driver out of the vehicle. They had even collected Priscilla’s purse and some of her other belongings from the floor. They had carried Priscilla out of harm’s way, gently placed her on the ground and even picked particles of glass from her hair and from her forearms. “She sure ain’t from ’round here,” one of the women had told the police. According to the emergency medical team—which soon arrived with an ambulance—it had been thought that Priscilla had been badly bruised but had escaped broken bones or major lacerations.

When she awakened awhile later in the emergency room at the Tallahassee General Hospital, Priscilla had no idea what had happened after she blacked out. She had not even remembered the ride in the ambulance. Her first conscious thought had been annoyance that strangers were touching her, and in such a tiny room.

One woman, who kept identifying herself as a paramedic, had repeatedly asked Priscilla the name of her insurance provider. But Priscilla had still been too dazed to respond. Later she remembered frowning at one young man in uniform as he took her pulse, while another intern checked her blood pressure. By then, they had found her identification cards in her purse and were calling her by name. And she did have some vague recollection of staff marveling that, apart from some scrapes and bruises, she had sustained no major physical injuries. As the medical team continued to check her out, Priscilla had come to enough to gaze at the walls and ceiling and pray that all this was just a bad dream.

She was relieved when the attending physician, a tall, slim woman of forty, stood beside her bed. “Folks, I’ll take it from here,” she told the other staff. “Hello, Ms. Austin. I’m Dr. Anita Tousse.”

Priscilla took one look at the doctor and blurted out, “I could be dead!” She took a deep breath. She had no idea how she looked now or after the accident. She was oblivious to the fact that her hands and arms had already been cleaned and bandaged. She learned later that her face had nicks and scratches, but no major lacerations. “And I don’t even think that guy who was in here before you even checked to see how I was doing.”

“I’m sorry to hear that, Ms. Austin,” the doctor said. As she pressed down on her lower abdomen and other parts of Priscilla’s body, she kept asking: “Can you feel anything I’m doing? How about this? Are you experiencing any pain?”

“My entire left side is throbbing. And I’m a little light-headed.”

Dr. Tousse nodded. “I understand from the paramedics that you lost consciousness for a while. And there seems to be a little gap between what you recall and what some of the witnesses saw.” The doctor continued checking for any signs of pain. “Apparently, some of what happened has eluded you. But I’m certain you’ve sustained a concussion.”

Dr. Tousse had more bad news. She thought it best, before even considering releasing Priscilla, to take a Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI).

Priscilla whitened. One of her aunts back in Indianapolis had endured one of those tests, and Priscilla, who was claustrophobic, had assured herself then that she would never consent to let herself endure being moved slowly through some gigantic tube of an X-ray. But it seemed she was not to have the luxury of choice. Before long, she was supine—facing the underbelly of an enormous machine—and being instructed not to move. Priscilla, as she felt herself being rolled slowly, oh too slowly, along, thought she would die of fear. She considered how first she had been forced to reconcile to the fact that she had been in a bad car accident, then to the fact that she was in the hospital. Now this! She wished the doctor had spent more time preparing her for what was to happen, especially the loud tapping sound which continued and continued. As her body rode back and forth through the tube, she wondered: What’s that horrible sound? Is the darn machine broken? Her head ached. She was nauseated. Her muscles tightened. She balled up her fists. She closed her eyes. Her body trembled. Beads of sweat rolled down her face, neck and arms. This cannot be happening to me!

As the machine’s motions increased, Priscilla’s body shook.

The technician’s voice boomed at her: “Try to be still.”

Priscilla wanted to curse at the man. Can’t he see I’m uncomfortable in this darn contraption? Get me out of here! Yet somehow she managed to endure the MRI.

Back in her room, two new faces greeted her. A young black police officer introduced himself and his partner. “Well, Ms. Austin, I’m Officer Marvin Lancaster and this here’s Detective Lance Sommers.”

The detective started the questions. “Do you recall why you’re here and what exactly happened to you?”

Still somewhat shaken from that traumatic MRI, Priscilla fixed her eyes suspiciously on the detective. Instead, she directed her answer to Officer Lancaster. “Yes, Officer, I remember.” She wondered why a detective had come to the hospital to investigate what she assumed was a simple car accident. What she found out later was that the driver of the other car was a known narcotics dealer. The detective apparently had been trying to assess whether she had any connection to that driver before the crash. Little did she know it, but it had been to her advantage that, according to the hospital personnel, the uninjured driver of the Pontiac which had hit her had not even checked to see how she was doing.

Priscilla patiently told her story. “I was driving home from church,” she began. Then she described realizing she was lost in a part of the city she had never seen. Her account of the actual accident was brief. “I remember a massive crash, or crunch of sorts on my left side … covering my face, feeling like I was in a whirlpool and then slamming down hard to the ground. That’s about all I honestly remember. I don’t even know how I got out of my car or to the hospital.”

The officers exchanged a knowing look.

Detective Sommers nodded. “That fits what we’ve heard.” Then, “Ma’am, you’re not from ’round these parts, are you?”

“No, Detective, I’m not ‘from ’round these parts.’” Priscilla was lying down, or she might have drawn herself up to full height. “I am from Prendergast, New York. And I am on the faculty at FAMU. And I have never even been in an accident before, not to mention one in which I had a near-death experience.”

After Priscilla stopped talking, the detective shared with her the “several consistent accounts of the accident” that had already been provided by Monica Ratcliff and the other woman who had rescued her from her wrecked car. The two witnesses were residents of the Chipley Square Housing Project and were both on welfare. They had not only confirmed Priscilla’s account of the accident but had also done so with greater clarity and much more detail. They had acknowledged that they had pulled Priscilla out of her car and called the police and an ambulance. “The driver of the other car was speeding,” Monica had told the officers, “and ran straight through that stop sign. And no, he didn’t even come back to see what’d happened to that girl.”

As it turned out, the police officers had merely wanted to get Priscilla’s side of the story, “for the record.” They told Priscilla they were satisfied that she had not known the other driver and that there were no contradictions in the various accounts of the accident. Officer Lancaster added that since there were no signs of any kind of skid marks on either side of the intersection, their findings were that the other driver had neither stopped nor yielded at the stop sign.

As the policemen concluded their visit, Dr. Tousse was back again. This time she perched on the side of Priscilla’s bed and told her the most significant result they already had from their testing. Priscilla would have to consult with her own doctor about this, but the emergency room physician said it looked like she might have a condition called “benign positional vertigo.” As Dr. Tousse explained it, this was a rare but incurable condition that Priscilla sustained in the accident. “In layman’s terms,” the doctor said, “the impact of the collision joggled your brain.” What this meant, she added, was that if Priscilla tilted her head a certain way, her equilibrium would be thrown out of balance and she would feel faint and dizzy, as if floating in an ocean. She offered to show Priscilla exercises to alleviate some of the discomfort. “But,” the doctor concluded regrettably, “unfortunately, there is no cure for benign positional vertigo. It’s something you’ll just have to learn to live with.”

“Oh, dear me,” Priscilla whispered to herself. Of course she would seek a second opinion. This doctor seemed nice, but her diagnosis was not what Priscilla had wanted to hear.

Priscilla nodded when the doctor said they would be keeping her in the hospital overnight for observation. Today had been much more than she bargained for.

Priscilla took a taxi home the next morning from the hospital and then arranged for her insurance agent to assess her car’s damage at the garage where it had been towed. Later she called Dean Newsome and her department head at the university to inform them of the accident. She skipped supper and dropped, exhausted and fully clothed, onto her bed. She slept soundly until daybreak. She later found out that her colleagues at school had heard about the accident on the evening news and were therefore relieved to learn of her “satisfactory status”.

Priscilla downplayed the seriousness of the accident when she finally called home the next day. “Well, folks, I was in a little fender bender, but I didn’t suffer any major injury,” she told her father and then her mother and her brother and two of her sisters, who all had been at their parents’ home in Prendergast. She told them she was “just a little shaken up, but I’m all right” and “enjoying a few days out of the office to rest up.” Priscilla had consciously used the kind of language she had always heard from her father whenever he had found it difficult to share with his family the true extent of any unpleasant circumstances. She was definitely her father’s daughter.

It was another three days before she saw the damage to that Mustang she had always loved. Priscilla was surprised how banged up it was on the driver’s side. It looked like a total wreck, there in the parking lot of a service station where it had been towed. She shook her head, for the first time aware of how fortunate she had been. The crumpled driver’s door had been bent inward almost to the center of the car. If it had bent inward just a couple of inches more toward the windshield, she would have been decapitated. Oh my, she thought. Dr. Tousse, as well as Monica and the other woman who had rescued her from the crash, had been correct in describing her survival as a miracle.

She had more surprises in store for her when she read the full police report. She learned that all the statements from the witnesses had been consistent, but that Monica Ratcliff’s had been the most thorough:

Around one-thirty Sunday afternoon, most of my neighbors and I in the Chipley Square Housing Project were outside in our yards or visiting with neighbors, and some of our children played in the street in front of our homes. We were having a fish fry and enjoying the day. But we couldn’t help but notice that girl driving through our neighborhood. She drove a nice-looking silver-metallic Mustang. Sort of reddish color for the interior. There was a FAMU decal on her windshield. From my yard, I could tell she didn’t look like she was from ’round here.

As the girl drove down Horah Street, we could hear the driver of the Pontiac approaching the intersection at Chipley and Horah. We heard the roar of his engine because he was speeding, so some of us realized that what eventually happened was going to happen anyway.

The girl in the Mustang had the right-of-way on Horah Street; the driver of the Pontiac had a stop sign on Chipley at the intersection of Horah. But just as the girl in the Mustang was about to drive across Chipley, the driver of the Pontiac sped through the stop. Just like that he did. That man had no intention of stopping, and that poor girl never even saw him coming. The two cars collided; the Pontiac had rammed into the driver’s side of the Mustang. Then, on impact, the Mustang rose up off the ground midair, twirled around, and plummeted back down onto the curb in the opposite direction it was driven from.

Some of us ran over to examine the situation. It was a horrible scene. We just knew that girl was dead and all mangled up, but she wasn’t. It all happened so quickly, but at the time, it seemed much longer. Then we rescued her from the accident.

Reading that report, Priscilla realized that she had been doubly saved by this woman: first at the scene of the accident, when she had saved her life. And second, afterwards, when her details about the accident had convinced the police and the insurance company that she was not at fault for the accident. Priscilla received the fruits of that last factor when, later that week, her insurance agent said her Mustang had been totaled and she would be compensated for not only her injuries but also with another car of her choosing. Priscilla was satisfied at that settlement. She had loved that car and decided to replace it with an exact replica: metallic gray with crimson interior—the Buckeye colors.

But she knew she had one more reckoning to tend to.

She drove a rental car out to the Chipley Square Housing Project to give heartfelt thanks to Monica and the other woman who had rescued her from the accident. However, the more dented and battered doors she knocked on in the vast and gloomy complex, the more dented and battered doors that shut in her face.

Priscilla kept yelling through each door that kept shutting her out: “I just want to thank the women who helped me out of that wreck.” But she did not understand that, as far as Monica and the other woman were concerned, the day of the accident was over—and they neither desired nor required Priscilla’s self-serving gratitude and patronizing posture for any affirmation of their deeds. To them, today was just another day further from the accident, and the likes of Priscilla J. Austin had been unwelcomed then, and were unwelcome now.