Kidnapped

By Debra Lee

It was a typical New Orleans day in late spring when Victoria Williams, named for an English monarch, pushed the pram roughly over the banquette. The pram was built for a taller woman. She was only four foot six. As usual, she was angry.

“At fifteen,” she mumbled, “Mama already had a baby. I’m fifteen, and she’s still sending me to the store. This is 1907, not the 1800s.” 

The pram almost toppled over as the fast-rolling wheels adjusted to the wooden street from the brick banquette, then again as Victoria pushed it over the jimson weed growing in front of the general store. Even though the store was empty this time of day, she left the pram outside. She wasn’t about to lift that heavy thing. For all she cared, little brother George, named after his father and not a British monarch, could burn to death in the sun. He needed some tanning anyway.

“What was Mama thinking, marrying that light-skinned man?” Victoria smiled to herself. After all, her new Papa was the nicest, kindest, most soft-spoken, gentlest, hardest working man her family had ever known. She set her sights on finding one just like him.

Victoria stepped up into the store. Ugh, she thought, ole Mrs. Johnson is in the store today. Can’t steal nothing, not even penny candy, when she’s on duty. If Mr. Johnson were here, he’d just say “Good morning” and keep on doing busy work elsewhere in the store.

“G’morning,” Victoria grumped.

“Good morning, Victoria. Your Mama wouldn’t want you leaving that baby out there on the banquette. You should have brought him inside out of that spring sun.”

“Yes ma’am.”

Victoria hurriedly paid for her purchase and turned to leave the store. What was Mr. Lee doing out there with her little brother? she wondered. Then she heard the baby crying.

She looked aghast at Mrs. Johnson. “He stole my baby brother.” Like James Lightbody, the recent Olympic sprinter, she was out of the store in a flash. By the time Mrs. Johnson bustled next door to the laundry, Victoria was sprawled across Mr. Lee’s back, beating him on the head and yelling, “Give me back my brother!  Give me back my brother!”

But once Mr. Lee made it to the counter entrance, he was able to brush the crazy girl off his back. She still held onto his head, but he ducked and pushed her away. He went into his home and closed the door, all the while speaking in Chinese.

Victoria landed with a thump on the dirty hardwood floor. Mrs. Johnson helped her up. “You’d better run home and get your Mama quick. She’ll get your little brother back.”

Crying, Victoria got up and ran across the street. She ran a half block before she realized that Mrs. Johnson had told her what to do and she did it. Victoria was angry with herself.

“I’m fifteen,” she snivelled. “Who is she to tell me what to do?”

She slowed to a crawl as she thought of facing Mama. This was going to be her dying day—coming home without the baby. Then she thought that she’d better hurry; Mr. Lee might already be putting George on board a boat to Shanghai. She began running again.

“Why couldn’t Isabel have been home? Mama could have sent her to the store,” Victoria groaned out loud. “It was all Isabel’s fault, anyway,” she said to make herself feel better. Her big sister Isabel, also named after royalty, was good at handling this sort of situation. Besides, Mama liked her more, and wouldn’t be hard on Isabel.

“Mama, Mama! Come quick! Mr. Lee stole George.”

Emma Newton donned her bonnet as she listened to Victoria’s broken tale of woe.

“Come on Vicky,” she said, as she walked quickly down the street. Victoria was genuinely afraid now.  What if they couldn’t get George back?  What if that Chinaman ate him? She cried harder. Mama was going to kill her anyway for losing the baby.  Mrs. Johnson would tell her how she left the baby outside the store. “Oh, woe is me!”

“You stay here,” Emma told her daughter, as she entered the laundry.

Mr. Lee stopped sweeping as Emma Newton entered the laundry.

“Helps you?” he asked.

Victoria heard her mother say something to the Chinaman. It sounded like she was talking Chinese. “I didn’t know Mama could speak Chanee.”

She waited in the hot sun for what seemed like hours, thinking childish thoughts about what might be happening in the laundry, then thinking womanly thoughts about the musicians she might live to see on Saturday night when she went out with her sister.

“Here, Victoria, put him in the pram.”

Victoria was shaken from her reverie, and stunned to see Mama standing right in front of her with George. She grabbed him and hugged him to her. She wasn’t about to let him go again. She was going to carry him all the way home.

George chortled as his big sister made baby sounds to him while Mama and Mrs. Johnson talked.

“You would think Mr. Lee had enough children without trying to steal one,” Mrs. Johnson said.

“He just mistook George for one of his. Wondered why he was out here instead of in the house.” Mama embellished a little, because it was nice to see sour Mrs. Johnson smile. “He had so many babies back there, he had to count them twice before he realized that he had one too many. George will darken up a little as he gets older. Our babies always do.”

Mr. Lee watched the trio cross Freret Street. He remembered one time when his father talked about his horrible early years in America; first the railroad, then work on a plantation in Ascension Parish. He’d consorted with a slave woman in the fields. Together they had three children.

Mrs. Newton knew some Chinese words and phrases. She said that she was from Donaldsonville. Mr. Lee’s father lived there. Could the gods have favoured him with this small bit of information that he could pass on to his dying father? Could this Mrs. Newton be his half-sister?

Turning away, Mr. Lee asked his next customer as she walked up to the laundry, “You put collars in pockeys like always?” He walked into the laundry and gestured for the customer to follow.

Victoria looked up at her own mother as they walked home. “Were you speaking Chinese?”

“Just a little. Grandmother Rose said that your grandfather taught her some Chinese words when they were on the plantation.”

“Is George Chinese?”

“He certainly looks it. But all my children have a little Chinese in them.”

They walked the rest of the way home in silence. As mother and daughter turned into the alley, Victoria said, “I’m not having any children.”

Debra Lee is the product of four grandparents, six ethnic cultures that lived in New Orleans a century ago. A fiction short honouring the Native American ancestors was published in October 2019 in the Scarlet Leaf Review. She is enjoying retirement in Atlanta, Georgia.