From then on, whenever we can, we do it in his car, then talk, then do it again. We talk and talk, and in all our talking he calls me Loraylee and I call him Mr. Griffin. He say I should call him Archie when it’s the two of us, but I am quick to answer, “No, sir, you’re my boss, and if I call you Archie in your car then one day I’ll slip and call you Archie in the kitchen of the S&W, and that will be that. No more Loraylee and Mr. Griffin. No, sir.”
“Okay.” He sighs. He wishes things could be different, too.
One advantage about being what Uncle Ray calls substantial and Bibi say is plump: My belly didn’t show till I was almost seven months along, and even if other people at the S&W noticed, nobody said anything besides Retta, who tells me she’s glad they didn’t make me leave. By then I’d been promoted to the serving line, but Mr. Griffin put me back to work in the kitchen, in charge of the dishwasher, messy work but easy. I missed the line, missed greeting people, asking them would they like a roll and don’t forget your butter, or the chocolate pie is real good today.
Just eighteen, I’d never been much of anywhere except downtown Charlotte and the S&W. I knew the bus routes and the neighborhood. Belk’s on Trade Street and Ivey’s on Tryon. The soda fountain at Queen City Pharmacy where I worked before the grocery store. I’d been around some, had been in another back seat with a boy who didn’t know a lot more than I did, but I wasn’t ready to have a baby. Then it happened. Soon as I missed my monthly, I knew, and for weeks all I could think about was having a baby to myself, someone to love and love. Didn’t tell Mr. Griffin till I had to. Bibi guessed soon enough. She and Uncle Ray asked me and asked me who was the father, but after a while they stopped. I wasn’t going to say, not to anybody. I learned something: If you don’t want to tell a thing, you don’t have to.
Hawk was born October 26, 1954. The pains started on my day off, and I had two weeks of vacation and four days of sick leave before I had to go back.
Bibi and Uncle Ray came to visit us at Good Samaritan. Uncle Ray took one look at Hawk and say, “They’s been some milk spilt in the coal bin.”
We got home when Hawk was three days old to find Pap and Grand Shumaker waiting for us. Grand studied Hawk, ran her fat brown finger down his cheek. “Humph.” That’s all she had to say.
A week later I was in the living room, nursing Hawk, when the phone rang. I’d never talked to Mr. Griffin on the phone, but I knew the voice soon as he said, “Hey, Loraylee.”
“Hey.”
“Are you all right?”
“Yeah. Hurting some, but yeah.”
“Do you need anything?”
A daddy for my baby. I said, “I’m okay.”
“We miss you down here.” So I knew he was calling me from the S&W.
“Okay.” Silence hung there on the phone while Hawk sucked my titty, holding onto my finger and grunting the way babies do.
“Well, then, I’ll see you soon.”
“Yeah, soon.” Then click. Tears rolled down my cheeks while I watched Hawk nurse on me.
I wished I could get one of Miss Roberta’s gowns for Hawk being baptized, but I made do with a white shirt of Uncle Ray’s that Bibi cut down, embroidered with lace for the christening. Couldn’t tell it wasn’t the real deal unless you looked close and saw where she’d sewed the buttonholes shut. But Miss Roberta’s needle makes magic in cotton you can see through. Tiny tucks held with spider thread, rumor is. Tatting and smocking, no two alike.
Of course, Mr. Griffin couldn’t go to the christening, which bothered us both. He keeps up with Hawk, asks me about him, saying all casual like, when I’m stocking shelves in the back and everybody else is talking in the kitchen. “How’s your baby?”
“He’s okay.”
“Healthy?”
“Had the rosy-ola, scared me he got so hot. But he’s over it.”
“Has he got much hair?”
“A whole head full. Curly. Not kinky.” I didn’t look at Mr. Griffin’s wavy red-brown hair.
“Eyes?”
“Yeah, he’s got eyes.”
Mr. Griffin laughs. “What color?”
“Gray like my grandmother’s. Not brown. Not blue.” I turn away. Mr. Griffin gets the message. I’m through talking about Hawk that day. But our boy is there, between us, and I feel Mr. Griffin listening whenever I mention Hawk to one of the other girls at the S&W.
We didn’t try much to take up with each other again; it just happens, sooner or later, like both of us knew it would.
We careful not to be together in public, but that happens, too, like the July afternoon I’m on the corner, waiting for the bus, and here comes Mr. Griffin, leaving Liggett Drugs. We don’t say anything, stand there side by side on that hot yellow day, not even looking at each other. But I feel the back of his right hand touch the back of my left, and one finger of his links one finger of mine, squeezes, lets go. I watch him walk away. Minute or two, a woman hisses in my ear, “Be ashamed.” I turn to see who it is, but she’s stomping up the street on her fat black legs and her clicking heels.
Hawk ask me once, “Who is my daddy?”
And I say, “He’s gone.” Give him a look that say not to ask me anymore.
Mr. Griffin and I, in all our talking and all our loving, even if we don’t say much about Hawk, he’s always there in the warm air of that back seat. Often I get home and find a twenty-dollar bill somewhere, in my purse or my coat pocket. How he does that, I don’t know, but it’s from Mr. Griffin, doing what he can. I reckon he waits till I’m not watching or maybe when I’m getting my shoes back on, and slips it in my bag, every couple of weeks. I never say anything to him about the money. It’s for Hawk, which we both know.
Mr. Griffin jokes about me never doing it with my shoes on, how I won’t let him touch me till my feet are bare. Even that first time we crawled into the back seat, both of us knowing why we going there, then getting shy for a few minutes. But he kisses me and I laugh while I take off my shoes. He say, “Why did you do that?”
“I never wear my shoes to bed.”
He kisses me again and that’s that.
After we do it a few times he starts pestering me about what I like.
I say, “I like everything you do, every single thing.”
He touches my titty that’s sticking out the front of my blouse. “You like that?”
“Um-hmm,” I say.
He moves his hand down. “And that?”
“I like everything except talking about it.”
He hugs me, his chest rumbling against me. He has a tummy you’d never notice when he’s got his clothes on. First time I see it hanging down when he’s on top of me I say, “I like your belly.”
“Hush. You don’t,” but he laughs that laugh.
I haven’t told him about the man from the city, how the commission’s gon take our house no matter what. And not telling Mr. Griffin makes me feel like I’m living a lie, but he’s my boss, might think I’m asking him to do something or that I want a raise because it’s tough at home. One day I tell Retta about Mr. Menafee and what he calls redevelopment.
“Have you told Mr. Griffin?” First thing she say, getting right to the heart of the matter the way she does.
“Why would I do that?”
She turns away, making herself busy loading the dishwasher. “You’ll tell me someday, girl, when you’re ready.”
* * *
My days off, I get groceries, take care of whatever needs doing, mostly stuff Bibi can’t handle now. Sweep out the whole house, take the broom to the floors, run the vacuum cleaner over the rugs. Couple hours there, if it’s done right, with Bibi tracking behind me.
“You get that corner there, girl, I see dirt you missed.” Or, “Grandma Alexander carpet that one, won’t never wear out.” Or, when I start dusting, “You got no oil on the cloth, Raylee. How you gon do it proper with no oil on the cloth?” Some days I shush her, others I let her go on.
Half a day with the laundry, eight sheets got to go throug
h the wringer-washer, then hang on the line. Once they’re dry, Bibi insists the tops of them get ironed. Days when I not got much left in me, I only iron hers and Uncle Ray’s. Hawk doesn’t care and I’m happy to sleep on wrinkled sheets, long as I can sleep, which I never get enough of.
Hawk gets home from school about when I’m done with the house, and we go to the grocery store. I wish I had a day off besides Mondays, when the stores are low on stock after the weekend. But no helping that. Every once in a while I get a Saturday, which always tickles Bibi. No matter how often I tell her, she can’t seem to get it that the S&W needs us there on weekends for the crowds. And she tags along with me to the grocery store, bothers me with picking up first one thing and then the other, worse than Hawk. She sees baked beans on sale, starts going on about buying ten cans to save fifty cents, no matter that we eat beans too much and we’ve got no room left in the hall closet that she calls the pantry. “We can set them on top the fridge, is what,” she say, putting two more cans in the cart. “Ray likes them with molasses and bacon. Could eat a whole can by himself.”
Hawk takes a jar of cherries off the shelf. “Can we get these, Mama? They’re pretty.”
Bibi grabs another can of beans.
“No, Bibi.” My voice is sharp, making her jump. “The canned tomatoes on sale last week, we stacked them on top the fridge, remember?”
She looks ashamed, like she always does when I remind her of something she forgot, then I feel bad, too. I leave the beans in the cart. We’ll put them on the board over the washer. Little enough I can do to please her, and canned beans on sale don’t amount to much.
Hawk whines when I put the cherries back, but for the same forty-nine cents I can get a pound of ground beef.
So that’s the way it is the day we bump into Mr. Griffin. I’m pushing a cart along the aisle of the A&P with Hawk tagging behind and Bibi beside me, her taking things off the shelf, me putting them back. We come to the end of the cereal aisle, he comes from bread, and we almost run our carts head-on into one another. Smiling. Embarrassed. I catch myself and say, “Bibi, this my boss man, Mr. Griffin.”
At the same time he say, “Hello, Loraylee.”
“My, my,” say Bibi. “A pleasure, a pleasure.”
“This my grandmother, Bibi—” I stammer. “I mean Livinia. Mrs. Livinia Hawkins. You’ve heard me mention her.”
“I have. Nice to meet you, Mrs. Hawkins.” He looks at Hawk, who is by my side, close to me. “And you must be Hawk.” Mr. Griffin puts out his hand like he was meeting another man, but Hawk steps back, stares at the floor, his arms behind his back.
“You good to my Raylee,” say Bibi. I’m thinking she doesn’t know how good. My eyes meet his for a second, the same thing on his mind.
“I’m lucky to have Loraylee at the S&W, don’t know what we’d do without her.” He smiles at Bibi while he say this. “Last week one of my customers told me how much he enjoys talking with her on the line, and—”
Hawk pushes our cart against his, shouts, “Go on!”
“Hawk!” I say, my voice sharp. “Hush.”
Mr. Griffin steps back, bumps into a shelf, face red. “I startled him, that’s all, stopping y’all in the middle of your shopping.”
Hawk mumbles something and turns away.
Mr. Griffin tells Bibi goodbye and goes on down the aisle. I’m thinking Hawk has a first-rate man for his daddy, even if they never gon know each other.
“Mm-mmm,” say Bibi. She tips Hawk’s chin, making him look at her. “Why you sass that nice man?”
Hawk turns away from his great-grandmother. She looks at me like she suspects something but can’t think what. Time was she would know for sure and would say it right out. I take a package of pork chops from the meat case, telling Bibi, “Uncle Ray does favor pork chops and baked beans.” I push the cart toward the milk cooler.
The next day Mr. Griffin calls me to his office, saying out loud for the others to hear, “We need to go over your schedule.” He closes the door behind us. I sit in the chair across from his desk. He sighs, standing by the side window, staring out at the parking lot, a vast array of cars. Drums his fingers on the windowsill before coming around to me. Kneels beside my chair, puts his head in my lap. I want to cry, but what I do is pat his head, like I would if Hawk came to me this way.
“What’re we going to do?” Mr. Griffin ask me. “What’re we going to do?”
CHAPTER 8
Before Nettie got sick and died, those awful months in 1958, Eben’s favorite part of the day was early morning. He’d sit at the kitchen table and watch her reach for a pot, fill it with water, set it to boil, adjust the gas flame. The morning sun, streaming through the soaring windows of their kitchen, silhouetted her graceful form, her feet never moving as she made breakfast. This appealing economy of motion was typical of her, something he hadn’t noticed in his first flush of feelings.
Benjamin Stone, one of his best friends, told him about Nonette Hasty. “My cousin Nettie, nineteen. She’s going to teach in the Vacation Bible School at St. Tim’s.”
Fresh out of divinity school, Eben returned to Brooklyn that summer of 1938, hoping to be pastor of St. Tim’s someday. Reverend Younger Tilley, long ensconced in the pulpit, assured him, “Don’t worry, many a church looking for a preacher, especially one dat’s got hisself educated. Meantime, we need us a youth minister. Kids too much on de streets nowadays. What you say?”
He took the job to keep his ties with St. Tim’s, stay close to what remained of his family. The problem was a salary that wouldn’t feed a church mouse, forcing him to work several jobs, his favorite at the colored library on Brevard Street, where he’d spent many hours as a child.
The first time he saw Nettie he could not look away from her warm brown eyes, her pretty face, her mellow voice that made him want to hear her sing. He wasn’t used to looking eye to eye with girls, and her confident height made him nervous, gave her the upper hand from the start.
Benjy saw how it was. “You’re a dead duck, my friend.”
He was determined to pursue Nettie and to marry her. His thoughts centered on this idea whenever he saw the tawny girl who carried her leggy self with such assurance, giving him a stirring unlike anything he’d felt in his thirty-one years. He manipulated the Bible school schedule so the two of them could teach the senior high students together in a study of the New Testament—two hours of class that breezed by like two minutes.
He spoke to her about a possible future together, but Nettie made herself clear. “I’m going to finish college. Get a degree. Teach. Nothing’s going to stop me. Not a husband. Not children.”
He saw in her direct gaze that it was so. She left in August for her sophomore year at Spelman and he began his letter-writing campaign. He sent her two- and three-page missives twice a week, writing on Sunday afternoons as he relaxed after a lunch hosted by a church family, and again on Wednesday evenings after choir practice. He wrote about St. Timothy’s and the people she’d come to know over the summer. Never again mentioned marriage, but stated plainly that he was available for Thanksgiving. Every other week he got a brief response, acknowledging his letters, thanking him for news of their mutual friends, but with no hint of anything he could take as personal. In a postcard in mid-November she said she was leaving to do “mission work” on St. Helena Island on the South Carolina coast. One sentence gave him hope: “I’m sorry I won’t see you during the holidays, but I’ll write again upon my return to school.”
He remained steadfast in his pursuit through her graduation from Spelman and the teaching job she took on the island in the fall of 1941, seeing her as much as he could on her visits home, and encouraged by an increasingly responsive correspondence from her end. “I want to work for at least a year before I settle down. Then we’ll see,” she wrote. She never said no.
* * *
After services on the first Sunday in December 1941, Eben visited with two of his favorite members of the congregation, Livinia Hawkins a
nd her brother Ray Glover. Ray, a fit man in his fifties, was talking about a tree he’d planted in their small yard on Brown Street. “Magnolia. It’s coming along real nice. May get too large for where I set it, but I’m willing to take a chance. Only a few magnolias in Blue Heaven. I asked—”
“Listen!” Loraylee, Livinia’s five-year-old granddaughter, came running into the kitchen. “Listen to the bells ringing.”
The air filled with the sound, all over downtown. The deep iron bells from First Presbyterian, the clanging brass bells at the House of Prayer, the bell at St. Timothy’s, which to him stood out among the others.
Dooby Franklin burst through the front door, holding his great belly, gasping. “The Japs has attacked us.”
Loraylee climbed onto her grandmother’s lap. “What’re Japs, Bibi?”
Livinia, her face troubled, held the girl, rocking, saying, “Oh, Lordy. Oh, Lordy.”
Ray Glover asked, “Where’d it happen, Dooby?”
Dooby took a cup off a shelf above the sink and poured coffee into it, squeezing his bulk into a chair. “Radio say Pearl Harbor, in Hawaii, island in the Pacific.”
“That’s not us,” Livinia said.
Ray said, “Yeah, it is, Livvie. We own it, something like that.”
“I’d better get to the church,” Eben said. “Folks are going to want to see me and Reverend Tilley.”
He heard Livinia’s plea as he left. “Pray for us all.”
* * *
The second week of January 1942, Eben went to the local recruiting station, the lone colored man in the crowd milling outside the storefront army office on West Boulevard. The only man in a suit and tie, and at thirty-five, one of the oldest. He kept his eyes down, stood off to the side, and touched his breast pocket for the reassuring crinkle of paper, the letter of endorsement from the dean of the theology school at Shaw. Most of the men wore shirts and trousers beneath heavy coats against the winter chill, brogans or boots, hats and scarves. Had he made a mistake wearing his Sunday best? Maybe, but he lived by what his mother had taught him: “You wanna be as good as the white man, you gotta be better.”
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