by Minrose Gwin
I’d just walked in from the streetcar when the call came. Over at St. Vincent’s an orphan baby under water, maybe drowned, maybe not. Me and Joey hustled, sirens screaming. I ran the light at Magazine and Napoleon, almost plowing down a cab. The driver honked and cussed at me. I cussed back, shaking my fist at him.
When me and Joey busted into the kitchen, a naked baby was laying up on the counter. A girl, dark for a white baby, which I knew she had to be, St. Vincent’s being for white children. A Negro woman bent over her, puffing air into her mouth, pushing on her chest. The woman was crying big old crocodile tears.
“Lord, woman,” I said, “you going to drown the child all over again.”
I pushed her aside, then did a double take. The child’s mouth looked like a mole hole in the ground, deep and wide and ragged. I looked at the Negro woman and she looked at me, her eyes fairly leaping out of her face. “Do something!” she hollered. I turned the baby over and hit her on the back and some water came out. Then I flipped her back and put my mouth over the hole and pushed air. I pushed and pushed. She didn’t stir. Finally, I gave it up.
Joey looked at his watch and said, “Time of death 11:23 A.M.”
“Glad you’re good for something,” I said.
The Negro woman sank down to the floor, put her face in her hands. By then the white girls were pointing fingers at her, telling how she was to blame. Joey took a towel from the counter and wrapped up the baby, and that was that.
Or so I thought.
TRUTH BE TOLD, I’m thinking I’d rather take this dead baby to the morgue than go home to eat, with Earlie so down and out since our own baby came and went like heat lightning. A boy, born blue just six days ago but it seems like a year. In the incubator he’d turned an odd shade of gray, a yellowish gray.
“Oh lord Jesus, what they gone and done to our baby boy?” Earlie cried out when I took her to see him. “Looks like they gone and drained every drop of blood out of him.”
The next night, he passed. We never even got to hold him.
If that weren’t sorrow and trouble enough, they’d operated on Earlie after our boy was born, for reasons I still can’t figure. Now no more babies and she won’t get out of the bed, barely pecks at the food I bring. She just lays there like a shriveled-up baby bird in a nest of puddled-up sheets and blankets, bone and more bone, her fingers curled up like claws. And the milk just keeps pouring out of her, like a bad joke. Before all this happened with the dead orphan baby, I was going to run by Piggly Wiggly and bring her some rainbow sherbet, though I didn’t have high hopes of interesting her in it.
I settle the baby girl on the seat beside me, the towel a bit looser, the top of her head inching out, a downy fuzz.
I crank up the engine, but then one thing leads to another. I touch the baby’s little head. The hair like silk. Been so busy taking care of Earlie, I hadn’t had time to cry over my boy. Now here come twin rivers down the sides of my cheeks. I stroke the top of the baby girl’s head, studying the fuzz, how it springs to my touch.
Then I can’t help myself. I cut the engine and pick her up. I put her in my lap and hold her, just hold her, her little arms falling off to the side, limp and soft. My boy would have gotten to be big like this one. He would have been light-skinned, like Earlie and me, a good-looking Creole boy. We never got to hold him. They took him away, and then he was laying in a coffin the size of a shoe box and that was that. This baby here’s big, probably make four or five of him.
Now baby’s feet slide out from the towel. Pretty little toes! Plump and firm. I cup them in my hands. I got long fingers. My mother always told me I ought to learn to play the piano, play me some honky-tonk with them fingers, she’d tell me. These fingers, they cup baby’s fat toes.
Now I rub her little chest, then pat it. Rub and pat. The waterfalls from my eyes soak her towel around the belly. Aw, child, aw child. After a while, the waterfall turns to a slow drip. I give the toes one more squeeze and put baby back down on the seat and mop my eyes. I start up the engine again and pull onto the highway.
We go along a second or two.
Then something tickles at the corner of my eye, like a cockroach scudding across the floor. I wipe my eye again and keep driving. Cars slow down and people look sad as I pass, knowing what an ambulance heading back to town without the lights on might mean.
We’re just crossing the next street when the tickle tickles again. I look down at baby’s feet. What pink toes for a dead baby! I touch one. Is it warm? Just as I touch it again, the baby girl lets go a little cough and the towel over her face produces a good-sized wet spot.
I jump right out of my skin, landing the ambulance on the shoulder of the road. I rip off the towel, just in time for baby to cough and spew more water. Exactly like a whale surfacing, exactly like that. All I can see now is that dark spout in her face, and water’s gushing out of it.
I turn her over, and here comes the rest of the water. After all that, you’d think a baby would cry. Instead, when I turn her back over, she points her two little teeth at me and does her best to smile and doing a damn good job given the equipment she’s working with. Ain’t no fool, that girl. This ambulance man just held her like a real baby, like she belonged to him, she ain’t going nowhere, no sirree bobtail. Now she reaches for my finger. I snatch her up and put her head on my shoulder, hit her hard on the back to make sure all the water’s out. She makes contact with my thumb and holds on for dear life. She throws her head back and aims those little teeth at me again. Lord, the one ought to be named Lazarus!
I need somebody to tell me what to do next with this throwaway baby girl.
Then I picture Earlie in that bed, her hand thrumming the covers, her face turned to the wall. I picture our poor little son, wizened as an old man.
So I turn baby girl around and hold her tight in my lap with my right arm. She coos and pats the steering wheel, like she’s saying, Where to, mister? With my left hand, I pull the ambulance back onto the road. “We going home now,” I say, and turn the car in the opposite direction of the morgue or the hospital or the orphanage.
WHEN WE GET to our little shotgun on Miro Street, I pull the ambulance up to the curb and hustle the baby inside. Thankfully, it’s a chilly morning and nobody’s sitting out on their porches.
Earlie’s still asleep. She’s turned onto her back, her chin tilted up to the sky, catching the noonday light coming through the streaked window next to the bed. I lay little Lazarus down beside her, and she looks like she belongs there, their skin the exact same color.
I sit down and put on my thinking cap. Here’s a throwaway nobody’s going to miss. But her papers say she’s white. Even if me and Earlie try to adopt her, this is 1962, somebody’ll just think we’re being uppity, I could lose my job for even asking, or worse.
Just then, she starts fussing and fidgeting and kicking Earlie in the side. Earlie opens her eyes, then reaches out. Her hand lands on the baby’s hand and the baby grabs a finger. Earlie sits straight up in bed.
Then she takes one look and near about jumps up off the bed, then glares up at me. “What you gone and done, you crazy fool man?”
“Looka here, girl,” I begin. “I got you a present. This one’s a throwaway.”
Earlie gives me one long look. Something, a speck of light, flares in her eyes. She picks up the baby girl and looks her over. Then she grins. “Lord, Fred, couldn’t you have got me a prettier one?”
“The pretty ones was all taken,” I say. “But this one, she’s got the Lord’s hand on her, this one rose up from the dead. This one here’s bound and determined to live. No losing her.”
Just then the baby girl puts Earlie’s finger in her mouth and begins to suck. I hold my breath. Earlie looks at the baby, then at me, then back at the baby. Then her hand finds the buttons on the front of her gown.
And that’s the end of the story.
Except that I took back the ambulance that afternoon and filled out the paperwork like I’d taken the dead
baby to the morgue. Then I turned in my quitting paper and rode the streetcar home like always. The next day Earlie and me and our baby girl lit out on the Greyhound bus for the furthest place up the line, which was Nashville, Tennessee, and nobody ever said a mumbling word. The first thing I did after I got a job driving ambulances for Baptist Hospital was fix our girl’s poor mouth. We’re raising her black, and proud of it—what else can we do? She has the happiest of homes, the best me and Earlie have to give, and when it comes time for college, we’re going to send her to the best, Fisk University, which, as it happens, is right down the street. She’s smart as a whip, says she’s going to get a scholarship, not be a burden on us.
Oh, and Earlie wouldn’t let me name her Lazarus. Her name’s Josephine, after Earlie’s grandmother. We call her Josie.
15
June
AFTER MY SISTER WENT AWAY, I USED TO THINK ABOUT her little child all the time, wondering what had happened to it. I made up stories in my head. It got adopted by Liz Taylor and swam in a huge backyard pool with its adopted big sister, Maria. It was shipped off to missionaries in the Belgian Congo and is still out there in the jungle handing out bibles to the natives. It got taken by the Amish up north, wears a bonnet or a funny hat, rides around in a carriage.
At night I dreamed of the baby.
It would call to me to come outside to play. It wanted to be found behind the trees and bushes in our backyard. It wanted to laugh and tickle and roll in the grass the way children do. I would tell it no. I would say I was a grown girl, and grown girls don’t play like that. I would touch its fat little bottom, the tuft of hair on the top of its little head. Are you a girl or a boy? I’d ask.
After our father took Grace to Frances’s, he never spoke of my sister, much less of her little child: what was going to happen to it, where it was going to go in this big wide world. By that time Grace had left Frances’s, why I don’t know, and had gone to that Catholic home for girls in her kind of trouble. For her birthday, I sent her the Supremes’ new album, which I almost wore out listening to before putting it in the mail. To the package I added a pair of red wool socks and a box of Russell Stover chocolate creams. Outside, it was dark and rainy and bone cold. I’d read Dickens the summer before and pictured the girls’ home as miserably cold with wet drafty dark hallways, the girls, pasty-faced and wall-eyed, with spindly arms and legs protruding from their pear-shaped trunks, holding up bowls while a nun with a ladle doled out weevilly gruel from a monster pot.
I wasn’t surprised when my sister didn’t write to thank me for the presents. When she’d headed out the door that morning with her one pitiful suitcase, a hand-me-down from Mama’s closet, her face was a sheet of ice. I followed the two of them out to the driveway, but she wouldn’t even look at me. The few days between the night I told Dad and the morning he took her away, she stayed in her room with the door closed. I slept in the hallway outside her door rolled up in a blanket on the floor, whispering to her through the door. I pointed out that I wasn’t a tattletale by nature; I’d done intimate things for her. I’d hidden her underwear, which she’d been careless enough to throw on the bathroom floor after one of her nights out. Once, when there’d been a thunderstorm, I’d tiptoed into her empty room and shut the open window over her desk so her things wouldn’t get wet. Didn’t I get some credit for keeping her from getting caught up to now?
Secretly I counted her a fool for letting things go along the way she had. Did she think she could just pop out a living, hollering baby one bright sunny day and people wouldn’t notice? Not to speak of the fact that she was a spare, lanky girl. Did she think people were blind? Was she going to flush it down the commode at school the way some unknown girl had tried to do last year, giving poor Jackie Simms a heart attack when she went into the stall and saw something grayish coiled up in the toilet, something writhing about, something that looked like it had come up through the pipes?
I regret to say that over time I actually came to think of Grace’s little child as a snake, coiled up and ready to strike. What a terrible thing, to think of an innocent baby that way!
There was something about the threeness of Grace’s situation that had rubbed off on the baby I dreamed up. A week before the night I first saw the little curve of my sister’s belly in the moonlight as she lay sleeping, I happened to be following her as she walked home with Daniel and George. When they stopped to cross a street, George reached across Grace to touch Daniel on the arm, his fingers lingering on the front of her blouse. She arched into his touch, smiling up at him, then over at Daniel, whose hand was, I suddenly saw, on her waist.
Up to that moment, I’d been secretly thrilled by my sister’s shenanigans. I actually had a bit of a crush on George, and followed along in hopes she’d turn and then include me in their conversation. My life, unlike Grace’s, was dull as dishwater. Her presumed romance with Daniel had all the elements of an ill-fated love story à la Romeo and Juliet. Daniel Baker was just the type to wear one of those tight getups Romeo wore, and willowy Grace would be perfect as Juliet.
But the three of them together bowled me over despite the fact that even at fourteen I fancied myself knowledgeable in the ways of the world. I hadn’t gone and done it, but I had friends who had. I knew about the boy sticking his you-know into the girl’s you-know-what and pictured this activity being performed over a toilet. I couldn’t figure out how it would work with two boys and a girl. Before I’d observed the three of them on that street corner, I’d speculated that maybe Grace had been going steady with Daniel and George, but separately and secretly. But that wasn’t it at all, I now saw; this was something else I didn’t have a name for, something that made the hair rise on the back of my neck, like my mother’s birdcalls.
When I went into my father’s room to tell him Grace was going to have a baby, he was lying on his back on the bed smoking and listening to the radio. There was an empty glass streaked with cherry bounce and an empty bottle on the bedside table. He was on my mother’s side, his bedroom slippers on the floor, where she used to keep hers. He didn’t look up when I came in.
When I told him about the pregnancy (though not about its obvious complications), he sat up and threw his legs over the side of the bed and proceeded to stare at the wall. The smoke curled up from the cigarette in his hand, the ash growing longer and longer, finally falling onto his lap.
“Dad,” I said after a while. “What are we going to do?” The butt was down to the filter now. In another minute it would burn his fingers.
He stood up, crushed the cigarette in the overflowing ashtray on the bedside table, and put his feet into the slippers. He rubbed his face hard with both hands, leaving it red and splotched. “I’m going to kill her,” he muttered. “Then I’m going to find out whose it is and kill him too.”
In the days and nights that followed, I fixed Grace her favorite foods. Peach cobbler and root beer floats, peanut butter and banana sandwiches. These I put in front of her door, and eventually they disappeared. On the floor outside her door, I woke up every morning with rheumy eyes and a stomach-dropping sense of doom. I stopped doing my homework, and my teachers became alarmed, holding me back after the bell had rung, asking me questions about my “home life” in explosive little bursts, saying I could confide in them if I needed to, looking deep into my eyes.
After Dad came back from taking Grace to New Orleans, he loaded up all his cherry bounce in the car and came back a half hour later without it. In the days and weeks that followed, the two of us tiptoed from room to room, trying to stay out of each other’s way. Then he started up with his crossword puzzles. In the mornings he read the Times-Picayune from cover to cover. At night he got a pencil, gathered the funny papers page where the crossword puzzle was, and folded it into a neat square. For the rest of the night, he’d sit on the sofa, that little square of newspaper in his hand, his brow furrowed. Sometimes he’d look up and ask me questions like what’s another word for dilute or what’s the name of a desert in Africa?
Sometimes I’d know the answer, usually I wouldn’t have a clue. He bought a monstrous Webster’s and a Roget’s Thesaurus, which he set down on the couch beside him every night, leaving no room for me to sit next to him and watch TV. After he finished the night’s puzzle, sometimes leaving a few blank spaces, he’d head for bed, murmuring good night but not kissing the top of my head the way he used to do when Grace was with us.
At school, Grace’s abrupt departure, paired with that of the two boys, had started whispers, which irked me no end. Why did I always have to be explaining the strange disappearances of my family members, dead or alive?
“Where’s Grace?” my friend Hilary Lumpkin asked after a few days. Hil was my best friend. We were walking from first-year Latin to Home Economics II, where we were making seersucker shorts for the summer ahead. The question shouldn’t have startled me, but I was still in such a state over losing my sister, who now hated my guts for ruining her life, that I hadn’t prepared a ready comeback.
“She’s gone to stay with our aunt Frances. Frances has . . .” I took a breath and considered. “Phlebitis. She has phlebitis in her legs, that’s where the veins swell up and get infected. She needs help around the house. So Grace is going to live with her and go to school in the City. She’s so excited.”
Spitting out the lie like that, without forethought, gave me something of a rush. I don’t know why I drew phlebitis out of the hat of all the illnesses and diseases and conditions of the world. My grandmother had complained about having it in her legs, so it seemed like something that might immobilize a person. I knew too that it was dangerous; a blot clot could travel, as it had with my grandmother, and strike you down like lightning. One minute our grandmother had been pouring fudge into a Pyrex dish, the next she was dead on the kitchen floor.