“Yeah, but I’m over that now. I’ve been over that,” I add.
“I got a bad feeling about that house,” she goes on. “A real bad feeling, and you got King in there.”
“It’s just temporary, Mama,” I say. “It’s not so bad,” I say again.
“It is.” There are tears running down the side of her face now. “It is,” she repeats.
The doctor comes in, and my mother tries to smile for him.
The surgery went well, he says. They’ll continue to check her blood count. She can expect to get out in a few days as long as the hemoglobin levels keep rising.
“So who’s the president?” he asks her.
“Barack Obama.” I can tell she’s joking. The doctor can too.
“Uh oh,” he smiles. “We might have to open you up again.”
“Then it’s Michelle,” she jokes.
She stops smiling as soon as we’re alone again.
“I have something I want to ask you, but you can say no,” she says. “I know you’re busy.”
“Anything,” I say.
“My girls, I’m supposed to meet with them tomorrow; I would cancel but they’re so close to delivery and they get nervous sometimes as the due date creeps up.”
“That’s fine, Mama, no problem,” I say.
Then she closes her eyes again. I sit with her, thinking about what she said about the house, about Grandma Martha, for some time. When her neighbor comes back to relieve me, I lean over and kiss my mother. She’s muttering in her sleep with a pained expression on her face.
I rub her arm, and she quiets down, but she doesn’t wake up.
MY MOTHER’S GIRLS WANT TO MEET AT HAZEL’S HOUSE in the East. I cross the High Rise like I drove it yesterday though really I haven’t been in this part of the city in years. I lived here briefly when I was a little girl, across the street from Resurrection of our Lord School. It was a booming suburb then, and everything we needed we could access off of Downman Road, Read and Crowder Boulevards, or Bullard Avenue. Every Friday, my mama and I would see movies at the Plaza. Saturdays, we made groceries at Schwegmann’s then hit up Sam’s for bulk food and samples. Weekend nights, we’d eat shrimp po’boys at Castnet or black-eyed peas at Causey’s, and every Sunday after church, weather permitting, we devoured snowballs from Rodney’s before we even left the parking lot.
But property values had plummeted even before Katrina ransacked what was left, and now at least half of those places were gone. Hazel lives in a redbrick house on a just-trimmed lawn with barred windows and doors. I park and walk up the driveway, ring the doorbell. She answers, bigger than when I saw her last, and happier. She welcomes me inside, where it’s clean and simple: linoleum floors, two brown tweed sofas facing each other, and pictures along the walls. One is of Hazel pregnant, much further along than she is this time. She’s notably younger in the picture too, and her hair is twisted in short dredlocks.
There are about twelve girls already here. Some are on the sofa just rubbing their bellies, looking ready to pop, and some of them are in the back eating. I can smell the food; if these girls are anything like my mama, it’s from that vegan soul food spot she loves, and I’m not going to lie, their barbefu is what’s up.
I hadn’t told my mother but I was glad she asked me to come today. She’d been hounding me about working with her for years, and I’d resisted on principle, but the glimpses I’d had of her counseling those girls always spoke to me. It was something I knew I’d be good at, but it seemed too easy, like maybe then it wouldn’t be worthwhile.
“Just calm them down,” she’d told me on the phone on the way over here. “You have a very calming presence. I don’t know if you realize it. It’s why Martha wants you.”
And I didn’t want to get into that again, so I hurried off the phone. Now Hazel gives me a quick tour of the rest of the house, her wide African-print skirt swirling, her basketball-shaped belly peeping out over her waistband. When we’re back in the living room, she hugs me to her, a tight squeeze. She smells like Jergens lotion and incense.
“How is she?” she asks. “How’s Gladys?”
I nod. “She’ll be all right. They just need to monitor her for a few more days.”
Hazel starts to tear up. “I was so worried when I found out,” she says. “You know, she’s like my mama too. The mama I never had. I’m just praying she gets out before the baby comes, you know. ’Cause I can’t do it without her. I know I can’t.”
I don’t know the girl, but my heart hurts for her.
“She will,” I start. “But even if she doesn’t,” I say, “you got this.”
“No, no, you don’t understand. She’s been counseling me. I have panic attacks, about what happened last time, and I just shut down. I can’t do it without her.”
I try to think of what my mother would say. It comes to me, something like It’s a different situation you’re in now, baby. Or maybe just This child is going to live. But I feel like a fake saying it that way.
“You have a name yet?” I ask instead.
The girl nods. “We picked out two, one for a girl, one for a boy.”
“You ever say it?”
“Every day,” she answers back.
“Good, good. And just imagine the baby,” I say. “Imagine holding it in your arms. Watching it stare back at you, while you’re saying that name.”
She is tearing up again, but she nods. “I try to do all that, visualizing, but it just makes me sad sometimes, to think about the good stuff.”
“That’s all right, that’s all right to feel sad. You’re going to feel sad.” I reach out and rub her arm.
She starts to cry more. “Miles,” she says, “for the boy. That was my grandfather’s name, Miles. And then Ella for a girl.”
“That’s real nice,” I say. “Those are both real nice.”
She looks up at me, then looks down again. “You look just like her. You lucky,” she says, an accusation more than a compliment. “If Gladys was my mama, I’d just sit on her lap all day, have her feed me chicken soup. You ever do that?” she asks. She smiles. She has a gap between her front teeth. She is a pretty girl, brown skinned, and if the circumstances were different, I’d want to introduce her to King in a few years.
“She does make good soup,” I say, and we laugh. Another girl approaches, and I break away from Hazel and make my rounds. I ask to touch everyone’s bellies, feel the babies squirming under my hand. I toss compliments to them, catch them right back: they love my wedges, and I love how fly they make pregnancy look.
“When I was carrying King,” I say, “we wore muumuus and sat down somewhere. Y’all look like you could be walking down somebody’s runway.”
Then Hazel lowers the volume on the music, and everybody sits, the most pregnant girls on the sofa and the smaller ones at their feet. I’m still standing in the front of the room, I see now, and I make my way down.
“Gladys likes to start off with a chant,” Hazel says. She is sitting with the other girls, but closest to me. “I can start it,” she goes on. She closes her eyes and opens her mouth. I recognize the sound. It is the same one I woke up to some mornings as my mother entered meditation, a cross between an oh and a you. Hazel’s voice rises and falls, then more voices join the chorus. At first I wonder how long they can go on. I didn’t sleep well the night before—on account of my mother’s premonitions—and I feel like dozing. After a while, though, I start to sway; I even catch myself mouthing the chant. I’m a step removed from the real world when without warning the girls stop.
I don’t want to open my eyes, and when I do, I find I’m a little loopy. The girls take turns talking about their week: some wonder if they dropped; one saw heavy discharge in her panties and thought it was amniotic fluid leaking. She went to the doctor and they monitored her for four hours and sent her home; she was just paranoid she guessed.
“Better safe than sorry,” I say.
The girls echo that sentiment.
“I’m
scared though, more and more,” Hazel says. “I have a little while, but my dude is acting all funny, doesn’t want to commit to moving in like he said he would, but I got all the stuff, the car seat, the crib. All that’s at my house, so if he wants to see the baby . . .” she trails off. “I just hate that he’s ruining it for me,” she says. “This is supposed to be the happiest time of my life.”
And I understand. The month after I had King, I was thrilled to have a baby but the baby seemed to bring out the worst in his father. All of a sudden the man couldn’t stay home. I thought at first it was the women, but one day I looked out my front window, and he was just sitting in his car. He had been out there for hours. I don’t think about it anymore but being in front of this room brings it back.
“It can be both,” I say. “Both happy and sad. I mean, we’re not living in a fairy tale. For us, it’s got to be both. Like for me, it didn’t take long before I realized my husband and I weren’t going to be able to make it, and I was angry about it, believe me. That wasn’t how I expected my life to look. But then I had this baby that my husband and I had created, and I couldn’t stop looking at him, and caring for him gave me a peace I hadn’t even known existed. At the end of the day, that canceled it out, all the self-pity. I didn’t feel like I had the right to complain about a thing, you know. God didn’t owe me a thing if he gave me the baby in my arms.”
Hazel leads another chant before we disperse.
I stay for a little while after that. The barbefu is bomb just like I expected, and the girls turn on music and are surprised that at my age I know who Cardi B is, and not only that, but that I can rap along to every word of “Bodak Yellow.”
On the drive home, I remember that time again just after King was born. I hadn’t said this to the girls but it was my grandmother who saved me. She folded onesies and sat with the baby, yes, but she also got me up and she shook me real hard, and she said, “That baby over there,” and she pointed at him. She said, “He needs you, okay, he needs you.”
Even when I disagreed, she went on.
“He’s your child,” she said. “He’s yours, not anybody else’s. You’re the only one who can take care of him the way he needs to be taken care of. I can’t do it. His daddy can’t do it; it has to be you. He deserves you, and you deserve him.”
I’d tapped that first month down, forgotten that Grandma Martha was the one to lift me. I suppose I could have turned to my mother, but she hadn’t become Yemaya yet, and I didn’t know if I could trust her not to see me as pathetic. And I don’t know what’s going on with Grandma now: the strange clothes, the unkempt appearance, the outbursts. Of course it has crossed my mind that it could be dementia, but I’m rooting for it to be anything else, stress, dehydration, something she can come out on top of. Either way, there’s no question she’s not one hundred percent, and I owe it to her to see her through.
WHEN I GET TO THE HOUSE, KING IS ALREADY ASLEEP. The nurse says it’s been a rough night. Grandma was out of sorts most of the day looking for me.
I’m prepared for the worst going up the stairs, but she is smiling when I walk in. I tell her about Hazel and the girls and how well the visit went, but then the reason I was there instead of my mother stirs the grief that’s been building. I sit on her bed and let it all out.
“She’s fine now, but it could have gone the other way,” I say. “As much as we’ve been through, my mama’s the only person in this world who’s always there for me. And if she’s not here, I don’t have nobody.”
“You have me,” she says. “I know she’s going to be fine; she’s a tough lady, but you have me too.” She pulls me into her for an embrace. “I’ll be saying a prayer for her tonight,” she says as she rubs my back, and she shifts in the bed to reach over for her rosary.
Sure enough I hear her chanting as I walk back to my own room:
I believe in God, the Father almighty, creator of heaven and earth, and in Jesus Christ,
His only Son, our Lord, who was conceived by the Holy Spirit.
Josephine
1924
AFTER JERICHO’S PERFORMANCE, I DROP LINK OFF, GO home, and take a hot bath. My fight with Eliza and Major is still weighing on me though, even after I settle under the sheets. I have trouble sleeping that night. The next morning it takes me a long time to get out of bed. Finally, I only rise and dress because I know Charlotte is coming, and I don’t want her to see me in my bedclothes. Sure enough, she is at my door after lunch.
“This is beginning to be a habit,” I say to her, like it is unwelcome. The truth is, though, for that morning it had been what got me standing.
“I hope it’s no bother,” she says, already at my table. She has another jar of jam with her, and she hands it to me like it is the visitation fee. “I know you have things to do and family to care for and everything else, but I don’t have nobody here. It’s just me and Vern. And he’s gone half the time, and as lonely as it gets, at least it’s better than—than sitting there with him. My mama said she could tell a lot by a man’s shoes, but I don’t think that’s true. I don’t think you can tell much at all.”
She looks up then, and I catch the mark around her eye.
Oh, so he is that sort of man. My own had been the opposite, a saint when he could have been vengeful, loving when resentment was right at hand. But I have seen this sort my whole life, mostly in visions while women sat across from me, begging me to give them something that might make him stop. But there was nothing to give. I told them that, time and time again. Still they didn’t heed me and some had lost their lives. I make the sign of the cross.
“Lord, deliver me,” I say. “What’s happened to you?”
“Oh, this? Well, it’s nothing.”
“It sure don’t look like nothing to me, girl.”
“Well, he gets so angry sometimes. See, he’s just starting out, and the crops aren’t thriving, and then everything with the baby. I can’t seem to grow one, and when I do, I can’t keep them.”
“Might be on account of that.”
“No, he never does it when I’m carrying.” She shakes her head. She is stubborn about this one thing, gripping it to her.
“Yeah, but the stress.”
She looks up then. “It’ll be different once the crops start coming in,” she says. “If you think of it, say a prayer for me on that. Or the baby. Matter of fact, pray for the baby first, if you get to it, ’cause I think if the baby’s here, he won’t mind as much what else is going on. All this while he just thought we’d have a little one in our arms, or one on the way, and I haven’t even let him carry the hope, so he’s sad, and it comes out like anger. And my mama said you could tell a lot about a man by his shoes, but if she’d come visit me, I’d tell her that’s not true. My mama makes a lot of bad decisions in her life, and in a lot of ways I had to raise her, but this time I would tell her, that’s not true. So in case there’s a man in her life she needs to judge, she’ll know to find another way.”
I am only newly awake, and it is a lot to wake up to, and I don’t speak. Sometimes people want me to say something, to offer up a word that might smooth the matter over, cover it, but it is the silence that illuminates the peace. All of a sudden it is important to me that this child has some peace.
“Where does your mama live?” I ask.
“Forty miles east.”
“That’s not so far.”
“Far without a carriage or a horse.”
I nod. “That’s right.”
“But Vern doesn’t abide trips of that nature. If I go, he wants to come with me, and he doesn’t have the time. So she’ll have to come here. I tell her that, but . . .” she trails off.
I get up to refill her coffee. People tell me all manner of things, stories you wouldn’t believe if I repeated them, and I am careful to separate myself from their woes. I have to be.
“Sometimes I think it’s God,” she says. “After all this, the way my life has turned out, I don’t know if I can count on him; I don’
t know what to believe, but sometimes I think he’s protecting me. A baby doesn’t deserve to be born into this mess.”
“No,” I say.
“Yeah, so maybe don’t pray on it,” she says. “Maybe pray that I stay as barren as I’ve ever been. Maybe pray for me to get up the courage to leave one day; maybe that’s what God wants for me, and without a baby maybe that will be easier.”
I am looking out the window now. If I look at her, some of that sadness will pass through because I wasn’t expecting this, I hadn’t steeled myself for it. If she asks about the baby now, how to grow one inside her, I might cover my altar with blue cloth, a jar of molasses, and a glass bowl of water. I might tell Charlotte to finger each of my mother’s old stones, then clean them, line them in a circle around the water.
I probably wouldn’t; it messes a child up to see his mama hit, plus I’ve long forsaken magic. But I might.
As for now, I pass her a cup of coffee with my eyes on the table, and she doesn’t finish it. She stands up after a while and says she has to fix Vern his supper, and she is out the door before I can say Take that jam back with you. I couldn’t eat it all if I tried.
LATER LINK, THERON, AND JERICHO COME OVER FOR dinner and a game of whist. I am still troubled by what I saw earlier, but having them there with me is the greatest contradiction. There aren’t people in the world I feel more comfortable with, and the only thing greater that I can imagine is closing my eyes and seeing my mama welcome me to the sweet beyond. Link brought a coffee cake she sliced and hands out plates at the table. I push the one she passes me back, ask her if she’s saving the bigger slices for her better friends.
“Do you want a slice or a hunk?” she asks, and we all laugh.
It is silent while we eat at first, aside from the occasional moan. There is the sugar and the butter and the cinnamon to observe and a splash of vanilla makes all the difference, then—
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