River, cross my heart

by Clarke, Breena

  "Amen."

  "Lord Jesus, we do not see your plan. The taking of one so young and innocent. A baby, Lord. A baby child so young in the world that she couldn't have done a sinful thing—'cause she just wasn't here long enough. She wasn't here long enough to cause anybody real injury. She wasn't here long enough to speak ill of her neighbors. She wasn't here long enough to break her word — to take her neighbor's husband—to abuse the sanctity of her woman's body — to take her neighbor's hard-earned goods. She just wasn't here long enough! This

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  was a baby, Lord. She comes to you, sweet Jesus, without a sin on her soul. And since you called her, Lord, O Lord, take her to your bosom. Give that comfort to her grieving parents, Lord. Let them know that in your tender mercy and complete wisdom, you hold their precious baby to your bosom even this very day. Let them teel the certainty o your divine covenant. Fill their grieving hearts with the sure knowledge that even as your son died for our sins upon the cross, Lord, he died so that each and even' one of us — including this baby girl who has gone before her parents—will rest in your kingdom after their weary travail here on earth."

  "Amen."

  "And, baby Clara, look down on us with mercy for our sins. Because we know that all is visible to the great God and those whose spirits rest in his bosom. Look down upon your mother and father and your sister, Johnnie Mae, and all your peoples. Look down and comfort their grief and guide their steps.

  "Sister Alice Bynum, Brother Willie Bynum, and young Johnnie Mae, you have lost your beloved. Amen."

  "Amen!"

  "But you have not lost everything. You have not lost the love of God. And the love of God will see you through."

  Reverend Jenkins cleared his throat and was answered by several other throats. He turned away from the assemblage to hide his profound confusion. In reality, he couldn't see the Lord's plan in taking this little one, but he would not show this doubt to the congregation. He cleared his throat again and was again answered by other throats.

  The organist began with a whisper of chords, and Jenny

  Throckmorton's gently sweet voice rose urgently from a bosom so womanly it belied the youth and chastity of her soprano.

  In bright mansions above In bright mansions above Lord, I want to live up yonder In bright mansions above.

  M)' fathers gone to glory 1 want to go there, too Lord, 1 want to live up yonder In bright mansions above.

  "Only a teaspoon ot self-pity, girl. Even* day give yourself a teaspoonful, but only a teaspoonful. Fill it up full, but only once! Don't let yourself have more. You can't live oft it. But just a bit oi it is like a tonic." Ina's voice was firm but compassionate as the two women sat at the Bvnums' kitchen table when the neighbors had gone after the funeral. What with "this one, that one, and the other one" in Alice's house and patting on her, Ina had felt a little like a stepchild. She and Alice were as close as sisters. In the last tew days, though, all the years and all the giggling secrets had felt distant. Ina hadn't had the chance to sit with Alice alone and talk. Did Alice think that she'd failed to take care of Clara? That maybe there was something she should have done? But there hadn't been any way to know this was going to happen. There wasn't any sign or omen.

  The two women sat in silence for a long stretch until Ina became nervous at the quiet and broke in on Alice's sorrowful musings.

  "When Cap died, I didn't honestly think I'd ever crack

  mv face to smile again. I didn't want to smile. It wasn't even that I was sad all of the time. I just didn't want to give anybody the satisfaction of making me enjoy anything again. Cap made me so happy. Everything about him was a gift. Even-hair on his head was like a special gift tied up in a bow on Christmas morning. You loved him. Everybody loved him. Even my papa, who didn't like anybody, liked Cap. Even your papa liked him. Everybody liked him. And everybody pitied me when Cap died — including me. I fed on that self-pity, I got fat on it. I craved self-pity more than Cap after a while. I just didn't want happiness again. Not at all. That kept on until I realized that I was losing the very part ot Cap I wanted to keep—the joyful part."

  A carpetbag of threads, needles, and scraps sat on the rloor at Ina's feet as she worked cross-stitch on a pillowcase. U I sit up in the house some of these days while I'm sewing and I talk to Cap. We laugh a bit and talk and I tell him all about everything. I've told him about your babies. He knows them. He knows what's happened to baby Clara. He knows. Sugar, Cap'll look after her."

  "How do you know it's Cap you're talking to?" Alice asked. "How do you know it isn't somebody else or maybe just yourself you're talking to?" She allowed a small smile to play over her lips. It tickled, the way Ina always made God seem like a kind old man who lived next door.

  kl I know who I'm talking to when I talk out and Cap talks back to me. I know it's him. I know my Cap. He said to me one time, 'Don't pass up happiness, Ina Mae. You've got to have some joy.' I take a little bit of Cap—a little bit—a little sweetening—a little bit oi all these feelings. That keeps a life

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  going. One teaspoonful of these feelings: this sorrow, this joy, this and that worry and disappointment, and this and that of what the old people used to call fire in the loins. A teaspoon-tul o( each of these things is what makes a good life. You've had your luck, in a way. You've had the attention of two decent men and you still got a healthy firstborn child. That's more luck than some women get in a whole lifetime."

  It was Cap Carson who had started the chain of events that brought them all to Washington. It was Cap who had peppercorns in his shoes and who couldn't be content in one place too long after he came back from the war. His first idea was to move to Tulsa, Oklahoma. Tales had circulated and the colored papers were full of stories about the limitless opportunities in Oklahoma.

  Going to Tulsa, though, would mean that the men would have to go first and start some money-making venture and send for the women to join them when the living was assured. Willie didn't like this plan, but he had been ashamed to tell Cap. He was worried that Alice wouldn't remember that she belonged to him if he wasn't there to remind her. Alice wasn't a tramp, but she had been bold enough to go against her father in the matter of the Indian, Sam Logan. She might strike up a new plan that didn't include Willie. It would be better for all of them if they moved together.

  Alice was itching to leave Marabel, itching to get away from her papa. Pleasant and easygoing as long as she bent to his wishes, Old Man Walker had become a wild, mad bull since Alice had brazenly defied him with Sam Logan. Her sisters, too, had her in a web of soft but constricting tangles. Bessie had tried to convince her to get rid of the baby. Lula

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  talked against that and begged her not to run off with Sam Logan. After Sam Logan had gone, it was her sisters who encouraged the romance between her and Willie.

  The decision to move to Georgetown was a fallback from the grander plan of moving out west. When the news reached Marabel that white folks had burned the colored part of Tulsa, that sealed it. They would go to Washington—to Georgetown.

  Of course, Washington, D.C., was not without its worries and uncertainties. Mrs. Adelaide Circe's son Leon had been in the war and was in Washington in '19 when they were burning and shooting colored. He told it around that he and many of the other colored had acquitted themselves well in the rioting. But Leon Circe further maintained that when the war was over he decided to be through with fighting. And he came back home to Marabel and married Mabel Reliford.

  Cap and Ina came to Washington first when Cap got wind of jobs to be had on the waterfront at the navy yard. He fancied himself a stevedore after his work in the Great War. But he couldn't get hired as a stevedore. They shut colored out of that trade. He managed instead to get on a construction crew working on the Key Bridge. Cap kept working on the bridge until he and the other colored got rowdied out of their jobs by the Irish.

  Ina did baby nursing for so
me women that lived in for the first several months after she and Cap arrived. Then she got herself a live-in job with a good family. After a while, though, Ina felt this work arrangement was leaving poor Cap without a hot meal at the end of the day. And living apart wasn't the proper thing, in her mind, for a married woman. When she confided her intention to quit the live-in job to Miz Beulah Gibson, the live-out laundrywoman who worked for her

  River, Cross ,M / lean s^;

  family, Miz Gibson put her on to a colored woman who did piecework. This woman had more sewing work than she could handle from her regular customers and was happy to take on an assistant. From this, lna worked around and started to build her own list of customers. Ina's needlework was so neat and so quickly done that she was very soon established as one of the best colored seamstresses in Georgetown.

  Willie and Alice and the two girls followed Cap and lna to Georgetown after the harvest in the fall of '24. When the canning was done and people could no longer throw up reasons for them to stay in Marabel, they left. Alice s sisters cam-paigned to keep Johnnie Mae and Clara while Willie and Alice got established in Washington. But Alice insisted that they would come to Washington all together as a family: Willie, her, Johnnie Mae, and baby Clara.

  By the age of five, Johnnie Mae had already learned her letters and could count reliably on her ten fingers. Her counting ability came naturally from her mama. It was Mama who was always figuring up and weighing — bags of flour left; spoons of sugar; dozens of eggs needed; rows of stitches remaining; how many miles to the city; how many different trains to catch; how many days the nest egg would stretch; how much a pound, a bunch, a yard, a piece, a week.

  Johnnie Mae was the tiny doll within the larger doll her mother was that day in November when they arrived at Union Station, Washington, D.C. Clara was the still smaller doll. Willie left the three of them in the station waiting room while he went looking for Cap and lna. He looked back at Alice and Clara and Johnnie Mae and wanted to cry. They were so like three small brown chicks. They looked frightened, and he worried that he'd be unable to allay their fears.

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  Was he going to be able to take care of them all? Alice had been so hot to come here, but did she know what they'd be facing? She'd pumped him up, saying, "You'll be sure to get something. Cap says there's plenty of work. Cap's got a good job. You'll get something good, too." Willie wasn't so sure about that.

  Though Alice was frightened of the hubbub of Washington that first day, it was the City. She knew completely that day that she was a woman for the city, a city like Washington, D.C. She was here to be tried and tested. This city had a feeling of things being possible. Action would have true consequences here. Hard work would pay off; education would pay off; dreaming would pay off.

  Johnnie Mae, standing next to her mother in the train station, felt only her parents' excitement at the newness and the possibilities of the city. Their trepidation did not reach down to her. It stayed up in their chests and on their foreheads, well above her line of perception.

  The network of customers and acquaintances that Ina Carson had established would serve Alice well. While live-in jobs were plentiful for young colored women who came up from the South, Alice wouldn't consider being away from her children and husband for six days at a time. Most o{ the women who did live-in work and had children found somebody else to care for the children or left them to care for themselves. This was a change from what they were used to. Back home, when a colored woman took care of a white woman's children and cooked and cleaned her house, she brought her own babies with her to play in the yard while she was working and to help her out when they got up a size to. Here in Washington, the white woman didn't want no little

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  chickens pecking around in her yard and associating with her children. It was much stricter here about how you worked and how you dressed and how you conducted yourself while you were working. And the white folks here were scared about spreading sickness among the children. They would hardly let a colored woman enter their house if they suspected her children were at home with the croup.

  Some women who were well established told Alice she was being foolish to pass up live-in work. They said the good families would only want a colored woman who was willing to live in and wear a uniform. You could expect a good pay and tips and holidays from these families. But you had to live on premises. The "best" families expected it. They wanted it. They required it.

  Some lucky women worked and lived in a place where their man worked too. The luckiest ones, it looked to Ina and Alice, were the ones who worked out and came home to their children at night. But days work could be hard to get at times and often not regular enough. The pay was lower too. Oftentimes the families that couldn't afford a complete live-in staff, the ones that used day workers, were the ones who lived above their true means and might come up short on payday. But Alice and Ina decided that they would risk it in order to come home to their own place at night.

  Alexis St. Pierre considered Alice attractive, for a colored woman. She was not thick or plain or blue-black. Alexis, Mrs. Douglas St. Pierre, preferred a yellow or medium-brown colored woman to work in her house because she thought dark-black colored people were difficult to communicate with. It

  was sometimes difficult to discern their reaction to one's words; their very dark faces appeared so dense. The slightly brown or yellow maids seemed more amenable. Alexis especially liked Alice because she was not fat, only pleasantly round and filled out.

  Alice had never wanted to work solely for one woman. But Alexis St. Pierre had been gentle and persistent in her request. She'd said she would fix a good weekly rate and Alice would never be obliged to stay late. She'd said she would hire out for parties. Taking care o( children would be unnecessary because she and Douglas were never going to have children. Alexis had told Alice that she would have half a day off on Saturday and all day Sunday because Douglas was Catholic and believed that no one should work on Sunday. She'd said airily that Alice should take the silk kimono Douglas had given her for her last birthday because it was the wrong color for her but would be just right for Alice. This gift had sealed the bargain. Alice would come to work for Alexis and Douglas and work for them only.

  Alice's sudden, tragic loss was confusing to Alexis. It was hard to know how to respond. Alexis had known the child. She had seen both of Alice's girls briefly. She recalled them perched on the top step oi the back porch. The day she saw them, they had been chattering like magpies and had started when she opened the screen door and walked onto the porch. She had been surprised by them too. She was, perhaps, more surprised by them than they were by her. Oddly, they hadn't looked like they could be Alice's children and Alexis had had to question herself as to what she had expected. They sat that day on the top step like two small brown birds — Alice's two.

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  When Alexis looked into Alice's face the first morning she returned to work after Clara's death, Alexis knew that it was ridiculous to suppose that this tragedy would roll off her easily. She was ashamed that she'd caught herself thinking like some old Virginia planter about how "nigger women whelp like dogs and care no more about their pups than a bitch." The tale was told on Alice's face — in her eyes. This woman had been to the other side of grief and might not be back to stay—not yet.

  "I can work some. I'll work some, then go home." Alice looked levelly at Alexis St. Pierre and spoke without polite preamble or dissembling. Alice did general straightening and dusting. She faltered only once—pausing to swipe tears from her face as she removed, dusted, and replaced the framed photographs oi Douglas's and Alexis's families. Before leaving at midday, Alice plucked a chicken and washed up the dishes. Alexis assured Alice that she could put the chicken on to cook herself. As Alice left, she paused with her hand on the knob of the screen door and turned back toward Alexis. She let her eyes and cheeks suggest a smile.

  Leaving her own house
the next day, Alice said, "Willie, walk up past Miz St. Pierre's. Tell her I'm not coming today. I can't come today. I'll catch up tomorrow."

  She walked out o( the house with nothing in her hands. Her arms, unaccustomed to idleness, weren't content to hang at her sides but looped and twisted behind her back. She would have looked like someone out only to stroll if one could imagine that a woman like her had time to stroll. Her face was placid and she walked as if she had no destination. But her

  mind was on the spot — her mind was on the Three Sisters. There was a breeze that morning and the wind billowed her dress intermittently.

  The scent oi the air changed where the road sloped down to the river. The air was gauzy, absorbent. The moisture held on to every fragrance. The odors were strong on the path that ran alongside the river. They were odors unknown to Alice. She could not pick out specific things causing the aromas. She felt as though she were wading through their thickness.

  The Potomac was a sullen battleship gray. And it was still, leaden. The surface appeared impenetrable. It would not be possible to swim through this mass—not even for a swimmer.

  Alice walked along the path her daughters had taken on that day. She felt drawn along to complete a task of mothering by putting her feet into the same spots they had taken the day Clara died. She wanted to complete the picture so she could put it alongside what else she knew about the events of that day. She would review the pictures of what she was seeing and what had been described to her and then she'd know more of what had happened.