The Darkest Child

by Delores Phillips

  “Mama, you want me to go get Miss Pearl?” she asked.

  “No, I don’t want you to go get Pearl, ”Mama snapped. “I want you to get outta my sight, Tara. How the hell you gon’ go get Pearl when she at work way up there on Meadow Hill. I swear, I got the dumbest children in the world. Sometimes I wonder if all y’all belong to me.”

  I wondered, too. Sometimes I even prayed there had been a mistake, and that somebody would come along, take my hand, and say, “Rozelle Quinn, I believe this child belongs to me.” Mama would push me into the arms of the stranger and say, “You’re right. I knew all along that she was your child, but I loved her so I just couldn’t bear to let her go. You take her, though, because she rightfully belongs to you.” I would go off to my new home where there would be a bed from the Griggs Furniture Store, a dress for every day of the week, a change of underpants, and two pairs of shoes with good hard-bottom soles. I would have an electric light to read by, and rows and rows of all sorts of great books.

  Most of the books I read belong to the colored library, and the selection there wasn’t great, but I would read anything, even when I had to ask Mrs. Jordan, the librarian, to pronounce words for me. Winter months are bad for reading, but during the summer, I sat out on the porch, or in the woods behind the house, and read until God dimmed His lights and called it a day.

  “Tangy Mae, don’t you hear me talking to you? ”Mama barked, and I jumped because I had not heard her. “I told you to write a letter to Mushy. ”That was my oldest sister. “She needs to know her mother is dying. And you go straight to the post office and mail it off. Take the dummy wit’ you and don’t y’all be gone long.”

  The command was barely out of her mouth when she took a sip of coffee, gave a short cry, and doubled over in pain, as if she had been poisoned. Five of her nine children stood at her bedside watching and waiting.

  She breathed in and out through pursed lips, then her eyelids fluttered and opened, and she turned glassy eyes on the five of us.

  “You sick, Mama?” Laura asked. “You don’t feel good?”

  Mama placed her coffee cup on the floor and gathered Laura and Edna in her arms. “It’s all right, baby,” she said. “Mama’s just dying, that’s all.”

  “Humph.” Tarabelle snorted so quietly that only I could hear it.

  “Tell the dummy to fetch the tub and warm me some bathwater,” Mama said. “I don’t intend to die smelling like a white woman’s kitchen.” She stretched out on the bed, settling Laura and Edna beside her, while I stood there miming a bath to my deaf sister.

  It was uncanny the way Martha Jean understood the crude signs we dangled before her eyes. My hands had barely cleared my armpits before she was off to the yard with the water bucket. Tarabelle followed after her and returned shortly, carrying the round, tin bathtub by a single handle. She placed the tub on the floor at the foot of the bed.

  I retreated to the front room. There I settled and wrote a most convincing letter of suffering, pain, and impending death. I begged Mushy to return to Penyon Road. Mushy, whose real name was Elizabeth Anne, had been gone for four years. One summer evening, just after her eighteenth birthday, she had left for Ohio. She had not returned, not even for a visit.

  The house still mourned her absence. It had taken on a coldness that no amount of coal or kindling in the stoves or fireplace could penetrate. Life seemed to have drifted out through the chimney in gray whiffs of smoke. And yet, for some reason, we continued to exist.

  three

  Martha Jean wore a brown and purple plaid dress that was at least three sizes too large. It had once belonged to Miss Arlisa. Mama had given it to Martha Jean, saying how it didn’t matter about the size since Martha Jean wasn’t going anywhere anyway.

  It was true. Martha Jean did not go to church, school, or anywhere much else, except up to Miss Pearl’s house on Sundays. There were times when I would take her with me to the colored library in Plymouth, or to the Colonial store in town, but mostly she just stayed at home and watched over Laura and Edna.

  She walked ahead of me, exploring the world as though for the first time. She wore white knee-high socks, and I watched as her heels bobbed up and down in a pair of hand-me-down Buster Brown loafers that were also too large. She was not wearing a coat because she did not own one, but she wore, one on top of the other, two wrinkled, navy blue sweaters, each of which had seen better years.

  We walked past the familiar: small shotgun houses with tin tubs hanging from hooks on side walls, outhouses beyond rows of winter-bare trees and empty clotheslines, chicken coops, woodpiles, coal bins, the standard black cast-iron washtubs, and the ever-present water pipes snaking up through the ground like bronzed pythons.

  We crossed Buford Street—the area of Stump Town modernized by electricity, indoor plumbing, and telephones. It was the street where Frank and Pearl Garrison lived. Mr. Frank was one of five Negro men who had been lucky enough to get a job at the Pakersfield carpet mill. In our eyes, the Garrisons were wealthy. Miss Pearl just happened to be Mama’s best friend.

  Martha Jean slowed, then stopped. She raised her right arm above her head with the palm of her hand turned down—her sign for Mama. She then crossed both arms over her chest and leaned forward, her brows drawn into a frown.

  I nodded. She had asked if Mama was sick. I wanted to tell her what Tarabelle had said, but I didn’t dare. It was possible Tarabelle was wrong, and I did not want to confuse Martha Jean.

  Mushy could make Martha Jean understand anything. She had spent long hours, many days, teaching Martha Jean to read and write simple words, and coming up with different signs which she made the rest of us learn. Mama had refused to participate, called it a waste of time, but within a matter of months Martha Jean could write and sign all of our names.

  Martha Jean’s most profound lesson had been learned through a curriculum of intimidation and pain. In fact, we had all been students in that classroom with our mother as our teacher. Although I had been only six at the time, and Martha Jean barely seven, it was a day that we were not likely to forget.

  Late evening. Mama saunters in from one of her many excursions carrying a metal box. It is slightly larger than a cigar box and has a thin sheet of tin covering the bottom. She makes my brother, Harvey, pull up one of the floorboards in her room. She nails the box to the underside of the board, then she demonstrates how the tin slides in and out. We are fascinated. It is like a game to us, although we do not understand the significance of the box.

  Mama tears a strip of newspaper and crumples it into a ball. Her gray eyes sparkle with delight. “As long as y’all live, don’t ever touch this box,” she says.

  Mushy speaks up. “Why you showing it to us, Mama?”

  Mama shoots her a cold stare, but Mushy repeats the question. “Why you showing it to us if you don’t want us to touch it?”

  We are sitting on the floor in a circle. It is warm and cozy, all of us together like this, with a fire on the grate heating the room and making shadows dance on the walls, swaying to the crackle of burning kindling.

  Mama drops the crumpled paper into the box, then she touches Martha Jean’s arm, and points. Martha Jean reaches for the wad of paper, but before she can grasp it Mama slaps her hand. Martha Jean draws her hand back and studies our mother’s eyes. Mama is smiling.

  Again Mama nudges Martha Jean and points. Martha Jean is hesitant, but she reaches for the paper because she has been bred to obedience and has not been able to hear our mother’s warning.

  Mushy’s head rocks from side to side. No! No! No! Her hands are pressed against her chest, one over the other. Tears spill from her eyes and roll down her cheeks.

  Martha Jean misses the sign. She holds that ball of print-covered paper and offers it to our mother as if it is a sweet-smelling bouquet of roses.

  I am witnessing it all, every movement in this room, from the shadows on the walls to the shift of my mother’s dress as her hand sweeps down and shoots up again, tightly clutching the ha
ndle of an ice pick.

  She seizes Martha Jean’s wrist with one hand, but her other hand is wrapped into a fist of thunder that flashes a spike of lightning through the flickering shadows. The ice pick pierces the flesh of my sister’s hand and stands there, the handle sways back and forth as if it might fall, but we can all see that it is not going to fall. It is embedded in Martha Jean’s hand.

  Mama grips the handle, and deliberately rips flesh as she wrenches the ice pick from the tiny, trembling hand that rises with the motion. A dark crimson oozes from the wound and begins to spread across the skin and down onto the paper bouquet that has fallen to the floor.

  Martha Jean opens her mouth. “Baahaa! Baahaa!” Over and over she wails, twitching as she scoots away from our circle, across the floorboards, back against the wall. Her eyes are wide with terror and pain.

  “Baahaa! Baahaa!”

  I cover my ears with my hands but cannot silence those terrible inhuman wails issuing from some place deep within my sister’s soul, shrill and dull, long and halting.

  For a moment we do not move, do not dare to move. Mushy, Harvey, Sam, Tarabelle, Wallace, and I sit on the floor in a circle, afraid to move. Wallace is sucking his thumb, and I forgive him his pleasure because he is only four.

  Mama is wearing a brown dress with a wide white collar and buttons all the way down the front. Her hair is hanging down her back, and her lips are painted to perfection with ruby red lipstick. And I am so afraid.

  Mushy is the first to move. She wraps her arms around Martha Jean and pulls her to her feet. We all begin to move, fetching water, tearing bandages, pouring our love onto a wound that will never heal. We work as a silent, defeated army, beaten down by our mother, tending our wounded. We do not retaliate for our victory is inconceivable.

  In less than five minutes our mother had taught us to never touch her metal box, and the true meaning of fear. I wondered that day if I was the only one in the room who knew that there was something terribly wrong with our mother.

  Martha Jean and I approached Market Street—the widest and busiest street in all of Triacy County—where stores and office buildings stood side by side east and west of the railroad tracks. We passed the Colonial store and the Greyhound bus depot, then entered the business district. Griggs’s furniture store took up most of the block on the right side of the street, and adjacent to that were the offices of the town’s doctor and dentist and a bicycle shop. Farther down and closer to the tracks were the Fashion Dress Shop, the newspaper office, and the drugstore. On the side of the street where we walked were the Munford’s Hardware, the five-and-dime, the picture show, and a lawyer’s office. The First National Bank stood on the corner of Market and Rockside Streets. A center divider separated Rockside from the train depot.

  Poor planning had placed the white library, the city hall, and the courthouse on Rockside Street where they were disturbed by the noise of the trains. The courthouse ended at Barley Street, which ran parallel to Market. The Negroes in our town seldom went to Barley, and we called Rockside “white man’s row” because we had very little use for the street. We were denied entrance to the library, we could not drink from the fountain or sit in the gazebo at the courthouse, and very few of us could afford to deposit funds at the bank, nor were we welcome to do so.

  Automobiles were parked at meters along both sides of Market Street and on the courthouse side of Rockside, and people scurried in and out of buildings. It was always like this on Fridays and Saturdays. On Wednesdays the stores did not open, and if anyone passed through town, the only people they were likely to see were the Negro men sitting or standing about the platform of the train depot. Every day, except Sunday, the men would come into town and wait around for some form of labor to be offered.

  It was late afternoon, and only six men were left loitering about the depot. My brother, Sam, was one of them. He wore overalls and a plaid shirt. His hair was cut in the high-right and low-left style that most of the young men wore. He was neither the tallest nor the shortest man on the platform. What set him apart from the others was his light complexion and the sandy-brown color of his hair. He looked like, and was often mistaken for, a white man, although everybody in Pakersfield knew he was Negro. Probably the only person who did not know he was colored was our mother. She took pleasure in categorizing her children by race. Mushy, Harvey, Sam, and Martha Jean were her white children. Tarabelle, Wallace, and Laura were Indians—Cherokee, no less. Edna and I were Negroes.

  “Hey, Sam,” I said, approaching the platform where my brother sat with Maxwell James and Junior Fess, rolling cigarettes from a Prince Albert tin. Behind them and across the platform three older men stood, talking and staring out at the four free-standing buildings that were the Market Street Café, Pioneer Taxicab Company, Western Auto, and our red-brick jailhouse.

  Sam glanced up. His gaze traveled from me to Martha Jean. “Why you bring her out looking like that?” he asked.

  “We’re going to the post office,” I said. “Mama’s sick. She wants me to mail a letter to Mushy.”

  “How sick?” Sam wanted to know.

  “Real sick. She thinks she’s dying.”

  “Is she?”

  “I don’t know,” I answered truthfully. “She might be. Where’s Harvey?”

  “Who knows?” Sam shrugged his shoulders. “Trucks roll in, trucks roll out. Big boss sit in the cab, point out the men he want. Never say a word—just point. Never say what the job is, never say what it pay, and nobody never ask.”

  “Depends on how well a man knows you,” Maxwell said.

  “Yeah?” Sam questioned in obvious disagreement. “There ain’t a man in Pakersfield, black or white, don’t know every other man. Getting hired out depends on how low you cast yo’ eyes, bow yo’ head, and bend yo’ back. You know that as well as I do, Max.”

  “Nah, man,” Maxwell disputed. “You been listening too much to Hambone. Man, that nigger gon’ get you in all kinds of trouble the way he carry on. That’s the very reason the sheriff all time watching yo’ ass as it is. He waiting on y’all to start something.” Maxwell tilted his head toward the First National Bank and rolled his eyes, indicating that Sam should take notice.

  I glanced over and saw the sheriff, Angus Betts, sitting in his cruiser, watching us. Even seated, the sheriff was an intimidating figure. He was over six feet tall with a tightness about him that seemed to start at his waist and move up across his chest and into his neck and jaws, and he had a nose that was exceptionally thick for a white man’s. I guessed him to be in his late thirties or early forties because of the way his hazel eyes stared out at the world with what appeared to be boredom, as though he had seen it all before and would not be surprised by anything or anybody.

  Sam stared across the divider and mumbled something under his breath. He finished rolling a cigarette, licked the edge of the paper, then said, “Hambone ain’t so bad. Not once you get to know him.”

  “I do know him,” Maxwell countered. “Maybe you think he ain’t so bad, but he be dealing wit’ them white folks and they gon’ kill ’im or run ’im outta town. You mark my word. He keep running his mouth, and they gon’ do something to ’im.”

  “I agree with Max,” Junior said. “Hambone came back from Chicago like he’s ready to kill somebody. They’re not going to let him get away with that. We do need change, but he’s going about it all wrong. We need to organize like they’re doing in other cities, bring in the NAACP. We need to be in agreement on what we’re going to do and how we are going to do it. You can’t beat a man down with your fists and not expect retaliation but that’s just what Hambone thinks he can do. I, for one, think we should solicit help from the outside. We need laws to enforce the law—if you know what I mean. Take Chad Lowe for instance. He’s not a sheriff, deputy, or policeman, but he carries a gun and patrols the Negro sections, and we allow it. That’s the first thing we need to put a stop to.”

  They were quiet after that, maybe thinking about what Junior had sa
id. It was rumored that Chad Lowe, the name run together as one word by most, was the sheriff’s cousin, but I didn’t think that gave him a right to arrest people. He did it all the same, and people seemed to accept him as law in Pakersfield, although we knew him to be the proprietor of the Market Street Cafe and not a lawman.

  “Tangy Mae, post office gon’ be closing in a bit,” Sam said.

  “Yeah,” I said, agreeing with Junior rather than Sam. I liked listening to Junior. He had completed two years of college, and our principal, Mr.Hewitt, sometimes called him in to teach when one of the regular teachers was absent. Sometimes Junior talked about earning enough money to go back to college, but mostly he talked about the plight of the Negro. Junior was a lanky young man with a dark complexion like mine, and one day he had told our class that life was hard for Negroes, but harder for those his color. He held us riveted with his tales of the Ku Klux Klan, Jim Crow laws, and injustices taking place right in our own town. We never opened books when Junior was our substitute teacher, except old copies of Jet magazine that he distributed to the class and collected at the end of the day. Though Junior never told us so, we knew Mr. Hewitt was to remain ignorant of the lessons he taught us.

  If Junior had continued to speak, I might have stayed and listened until the post office closed. He didn’t though. He stepped down from the platform with his appendage—an old, tattered brown satchel that he carried everywhere—and joined me and Martha Jean on the sidewalk.

  “I’ll catch up with you later, Sam,” he said.

  I took Martha Jean by the hand and began to walk along beside Junior. As we cleared the tracks, I glanced at the satchel he had tucked beneath one arm. “Do you carry your lunch in that bag?” I asked.

  He smiled at me, a closed-mouth smile that lifted his cheeks and slightly widened his nose. “I guess you can call it lunch,” he answered. “This bag is filled with nourishment for the mind and soul. What I have here, Tangy, are promises and hopes, as well as scattered disillusionments. It’s like filling your plate with ham, green beans, and potato salad, only to have someone come along and spoon lumpy, dried-out oatmeal on the side. Wouldn’t that spoil your appetite?”