Miss Jasmine returned with the water, handed McArdle a glass, and sat back down.
“Would you be surprised to know that I was Sheriff Ortega’s house help?”
“You were what?!” McArdle almost fell off the sofa, and Whale barked at him.
“I was his house help. My mother did all kinds of cooking and housework. The sheriff married in 1926 and was looking for house help.
“Mrs. Ortega asked my mother to help with a party. Mrs. Ortega was pleased with my mother and wanted to hire her full-time as a live-in maid. My mother had a condition. I was just starting at the black elementary school, and my mother wanted to focus on my education. She wanted me to go to high school, and then college.
“There were colleges for black women in 1926, and my mother had heard of Spelman College in Atlanta. My mother wanted me to go there. My mother told this to Sheriff Ortega, who smiled and said, ‘Wouldn’t that be something! A Negro girl with a real college education!’ This from my mother who had only two years of elementary school and could barely read or write.
“Mrs. and Sheriff Ortega said we could both move in. I could go to school; in fact, Sheriff Ortega would take me in his police car.
“Starting from elementary school, and eventually through high school, Sheriff Ortega treated me like a daughter. Not his daughter, but like a daughter. After I helped serve breakfast, he would take me in his car with the eggs and drop me at school. What a sight! A little black girl, and eventually a precocious teenager, and by high school a full young woman. Every day, Sheriff Ortega was driving the police car to the black school with this young black girl proudly sitting in the back seat with the eggs.
“After he dropped me off, he would go sit at the intersection of Tennessee and Monroe Streets and sell eggs out of his car for an hour or so. Mostly to black people who worked for white people, picking up eggs for their houses. Then he’d go to the police station.”
“I read that the sheriff sold eggs out of his police car,” said Sam.
“That’s right—he had inherited his father’s egg farm. In the afternoon if he did not pick me up from school himself, he would send one of his men. All his men were so nice to me, and all called me Miss Jasmine. If he did not have any policework in the afternoon, he would sit in his reading chair and ask me to sit in the other chair and do my homework. When I was finished, he would read to me, and you will never guess what he read, so I’ll just tell you…
“…It was the story of Don Quijote de la Mancha. That book is two volumes, about five hundred pages each. He seemed to know both volumes frontwards and backwards. But that wasn’t the odd part.”
McArdle could not imagine what was going to be odder than some 1930s racist sheriff who read Don Quijote, but he asked: “I don’t suppose you are going to tell me that he read it in the original?”
“Better than that, he read it in Portuguese.”
“What, Portuguese?!”
“Sheriff Ortega’s father was born in 1865 in Brazil. He moved to Florida with his wife in 1890, and Sheriff Ortega was born in 1891. Sheriff Ortega graduated high school in 1910 and went right into policework. By 1920 he became the sheriff; his parents had died, and he inherited the egg farm.
“From childhood Sheriff Ortega’s father had taught him Portuguese, including classics of world literature. This included the thousand-page translation into Portuguese of the Quijote, the Bible, and Shakespeare translated into Portuguese. It may be hard to imagine, but a lot of Shakespeare was translated into Portuguese before 1800, and those books were in our house.
“Ortega Sr. died around 1920 or so, and Sheriff Ortega had nobody to talk to about his Portuguese books. Sheriff Ortega’s wife was born here.
“But after my mother and I moved in in 1926, Sheriff Ortega started to speak to me in Portuguese, read to me in Portuguese, and explained how the language worked. I think he worked extra hard with me because he and his wife didn’t have children, at least not yet.”
“I can’t believe you learned Portuguese! How well could you read? Can you still speak it?”
“By 1937 I could read everything. The Bible, the Quijote, and yes, Shakespeare. I guess Sheriff Ortega’s father brought some books with him. And he had a friend in Brazil who owned a bookstore, so he mailed him books.
“There was also a novel called Dom Casmurro. It was a psychological novel written in 1899 about a man in his old age who began to suspect his wife had an affair with a friend in which she conceived the child the old man had thought to be his son.”
“I’ve read Dom Casmurro,” said McArdle.
Miss Jasmine’s face flickered with interest to hear that.
“Now it’s my turn to be surprised. Of all the random books in the world, I can’t believe you’ve heard of Dom Casmurro, much less read it.”
McArdle said, laughing, “Look, Miss Jasmine, you are the hundred-year-old black lady who somehow reads the Quijote and the Bible in Portuguese. And you find it odd that I’ve read Dom Casmurro? I read it in college. Translated into English, of course.”
Miss Jasmine just laughed.
“In college I had some weird teachers. One of them had written a book for students of Spanish to learn Portuguese. They helped me realize that Portuguese is basically a ‘cousin’ of Spanish. Both languages are derived from Latin, hence the Romance Language family. In class we learned that from the 1880s, Brazil has had a vibrant modernist literature with numerous novelists.
“In college I read a lot in Spanish and Portuguese. But after college I stopped reading. I’m not sure what I could read now. But I do remember the contours of what I read before.”
“Aren’t you fancy with your words—contours, my, my!”
“Well, Miss Jasmine, it appears we have a lot to talk about.”
“That we do, but it’s lunchtime, and if you’ll join me and my nephew, we are having tuna sandwiches.”
“That sounds great. My I help with something?”
“The sandwiches are on the kitchen counter. Let me call Kenneth.”
Miss Jasmine walked to the front door, Whale at her heels. She stuck her head out and yelled, “Kenneth! Lunchtime!”
Kenneth and Larry walked in together. Miss Jasmine stopped Larry and said, “Excuse me, sir. Where do you think you’re going?”
“To eat my sandwiches, Miss Jasmine.”
“Your goddamn sandwiches. Like those sandwiches are an entitlement.”
“Well, they are like an entitlement,” said Larry. “You make ’em for me every day. I’m entitled to them.”
“Well, today is different. We have a guest, and you threw a tomato at my guest. How dare you?! You just take your sorry butt outside, sit it on the porch, and after we eat and go take our naps, maybe I’ll forgive you. Do you understand me, young man?”
“Yes, ma’am, I’ll be out on the porch like you want—yes, ma’am.”
Kenneth watched Larry walk out the door, looked at McArdle. and then, without speaking, sat at the table.
