All-Bright Court

by Connie Rose Porter

  “There really ain’t no why. I just crave it. You know how it is when you expecting. You be—” Mary Kate stopped talking and filled her mouth with starch. “When women expecting, they crave all sorts of things. Glodene—”

  “Who Glodene?”

  “She Isaac mama, that crazy boy mama. Heard say Glodene got to craving for some dirt so bad one time she dug outside her back door and tried to eat some of that. She wasn’t down home, either. She was right over in Buffalo, trying to eat Buffalo dirt. Can you beat that?” Mary Kate said.

  “Pass me the box,” Venita said. She poured some starch in her mouth. A little cloud of dust rose from the box and choked her, causing her to spit the starch out. It sprayed out onto the couch, the floor. Mary Kate got up to clean it.

  “Let me,” Venita said. She was so embarrassed. If she could have, she would have disappeared. But she had forgotten how.

  “Pour some in your hand,” Mary Kate said.

  “Naw, I shouldn’t.”

  “Go ’head, girl,” Mary Kate said.

  Venita picked up the blue and white box and carefully poured a few pieces into her hand. It tasted like nothing, and left her mouth feeling pasty and dry. “I see how you can crave it. It’s good,” she lied, licking the film from the roof of her mouth.

  “You think so? If the truth be told, I don’t like it. I just crave for it.”

  Going home was hard. Mikey’s return from school signaled it was time for her to leave. Each woman had work to do, corn bread to bake, pots to reheat. For Venita, every parting was like a little death. She went home and her house was empty. She and Moses ate their dinner in silence. She had told him about Mary Kate: “You know that woman with all them kids?”

  “That describe half the women ’round here,” he said.

  “She nice,” Venita said. “She my friend.”

  “A woman with a house of kids don’t need no friends. How she got time to visit with you?”

  “She find time,” Venita said. “She my friend.”

  “She need a friend like she need a hole in the head.”

  Venita did not press the issue. On that night, like on so many others, she made passionless love to him. She had no room for passion. She was filled up with purpose. She would have a baby.

  But what Moses said had stuck in her mind. Mary Kate was her friend. How could he even question? Like a hole in the head.

  If the truth be told, Mary Kate looked forward to seeing Venita too. She found herself saving up things to say to her, storing them away in her mind, folding them as neatly as sheets. On the days that Venita did not come over, when the house was quiet, the girls sleeping, Mikey at school, Samuel working, the sheets would sometimes come unfolded, all by themselves. Under their own volition they would come billowing down into the house. She would look up from chopping onions, from ironing a shirt, from scrubbing a floor, and realize the wave that was rolling lazily through the house was the sound of her own voice. The words slipped out of her mind. She would stop herself then, sometimes turn on Search for Tomorrow. What if someone came to the door and heard her talking? People would think she was crazy.

  On the days Venita did not come, Mary Kate missed her. That was the word for it. Missed. She did not tell Samuel this, but rather lived uneasily with the silences that were punctuated by the sudden fluttering of her voice.

  She was becoming acquainted with loneliness. Mary Kate was learning about loneliness from a woman who was newly visible, though Venita brought little of herself when she came; she often only sat and ate and nodded. It seemed that Venita was content with merely being there, that there was nothing left to be said. Both women knew it was not true.

  Her barrenness stood between them, a vast and unexplored field. It defined the path they took, a path that was roundabout and safe. Venita did not mention it. Though she was sure that everyone knew, she would not run the risk of putting her business in the street. One does not come into existence to be dismissed as trash. She did not want to tell it, and Mary Kate did not want to ask. This was a game adults played—minding your own business.

  If a woman had a husband who beat her to water every night, and her neighbors heard her screaming, if they heard her running down the walls, it was nobody’s business. The real test would come the next day. If the woman was seen hanging out clothes, anyone who had heard her cries would quickly look away, would pretend not to see her. These people lived inches away from one another, and much of what was done did not have to be told. They did not look away because they did not want to know. They looked away because they did know, and looking away was the only way to grant the woman dignity, to go on believing, to let her go on believing she was a woman.

  A week before Mary Kate’s baby was due, Venita had a dream. To these people who had followed the highways from the South, who had come from the cotton fields, the cane fields, the fields of rivers of rice, dreams were powerful. To them, waking life did not inform dream life. Dream life informed waking life. Dream life was filled with winged harbingers that swooped into waking life carrying messages that should not be ignored. Daytime dreams, waking dreams, were especially filled with harbingers. During the day, one was trespassing in dream life and was liable to be chased into wakefulness by something that was better left unknown.

  Venita, while trying to rest her eyes before going to Mary Kate’s, was swept into a waking dream. It was a winter night, and instead of grass there were cabbages in her back yard. Someone had forgotten to harvest them. Their growth stunted, they were gnarled fists, and Venita pulled at them, trying to uproot them, trying to feel that delicious ripping move through her body, taste the flavor of it in her mouth. But the plants were stuck to the ground. She hacked at them with a hoe, but instead of ripping free, the heads broke off cleanly and rolled through the yard. When she finished lopping the heads off from an entire row, she heard a noise coming from the beginning of the row. Venita thought she was hearing things, but the noise was clear.

  When she reached the beginning of the row it was daylight, and there was a baby where she had dug up the first cabbage. The baby was emerging from the darkness, white, colorless, struggling to reach the light. Venita pulled the baby out by a wrist. It did not tear from the ground, but slipped noiselessly into the world. The baby was a girl, and Venita placed her on the ground while she looked for something to wrap her in.

  She found nothing. All the cabbages had disappeared. She returned to the baby only to see her slipping away. Something was pulling her, and while Venita ran toward her, shouting, the baby sank quietly into the earth.

  The sound of Venita’s own screaming awoke her. She jumped from the couch like it was afire. She was so happy to be awake, to be dropped from the heights of her dream to the safety of her living room, that she felt like crying.

  She smelled smoke in the house. Venita ran to the kitchen to discover the pan of bread pudding she left baking in the stove had burned up. She had slept for almost an hour.

  Someone was knocking at her front door, and it couldn’t have been a worse time. All she wanted to do was get to Mary Kate’s.

  It was Mary Kate. She stood on the steps with Mary wrapped in a blanket and Dorene at her side. “I was worried ’bout you, you not showing up and all.”

  Venita stared at them. She was so surprised that she did not think to ask them in. “I fell asleep. I was just resting my eyes for a minute, just one minute—”

  “What’s burning?”

  “That’s my bread pudding, burned blacker than a hat.” She asked Mary Kate and the girls to come in. “Pardon my manners,” she said. “You must think I ain’t had no upbringing. Come on in.”

  Venita was excited to have visitors. It was the first company she had ever had in her house. But she was too distracted to show how pleased she was. She was trying to push the darkness of the dream from her mind, to make her mind a blue and blank sky. But the darkness formed itself into a cloud that filled her thoughts.

  She had her company sit in the li
ving room among the starched doilies, the cut-glass ashtrays, the figurines of dogs and cats. In the kitchen, Venita tried to scrape the bread pudding from the pan. It all came out except for about an inch that was stuck fast.

  “You don’t have to do that now,” Mary Kate said, slapping the girls’ hands away from the ashtrays. “Come on and set.”

  Venita did not answer. She wanted to. She wanted to come and sit, but she could not move. The cloud in her mind was producing flash after flash of memory. A storm was swirling through her mind, and the water from it spilled out of the holes in her head. She cried quietly, and Mary Kate was drawn to her silence.

  She left the girls in the living room and went to the kitchen. When she saw Venita there, crying and scraping away at the pan, she stopped. This was none of her business. She was going to turn and leave when Venita looked up.

  Her eyes were a bruised pink, the color of the crushed petals of a damask rose. In her eyes, mixed right in with the blemished rose color, was a question she had been formulating even in her days of invisibility, a question that she was looking for Mary Kate to answer. But the first words that came to her were “I’m all right.”

  “Why you crying? You crying for something.”

  “Nothing,” Venita said, and she added, “I had a dream.”

  She told Mary Kate about her dream, and while she talked she scraped the pan. Venita stopped crying while she told it, but when she came to the end, she started crying again.

  “Me and Moses ain’t never going to have children.”

  And so here it was. The field that stood between them, so vast and unexplored, reduced to a short walk across a kitchen floor.

  “You don’t know that,” Mary Kate said as she walked to where Venita stood. “Ain’t no way of knowing that,” she said, patting Venita on the back just the way she would have patted a baby.

  Mary Kate was not convinced of the truth of what she had said. She had said it the way you tell a child, “Don’t be scared of the dark. Ain’t nothing in the dark going to hurt you.” She said it like a well-intended lie. Because you could tell your child not to be afraid of the dark and know there was a world of fear there.

  Once when she was home alone at night, when she had only Dorene and Mikey, Mikey came to her. He had heard a noise downstairs. Samuel was pulling some nights so there would be extra money for Christmas, so she had to go investigate the noise. In her sleepy state she got up and tiptoed down the stairs, Mikey at her heels. From the bottom of the stairs she saw the shadow of a man standing in the kitchen. She screamed. Mikey screamed, and they both ran up the stairs. Mikey dove in the bed with her.

  “What was it, Mama?”

  “What you think it was? Shush now.”

  She told Samuel about it the next morning. “That wasn’t nothing but my work clothes throwed ’cross a hanger.”

  “No they wasn’t. That’s what them clothes want you to think. Some kind of haint was what it was. Mikey saw it too.”

  “What you see, son?”

  “I don’t know,” he said. “Mama saw something.”

  “Mama saw something? Mama saw something?” The pitch of her voice was rising. “He the one woke me up. Talking ’bout he heard something. Talking ’bout Mama saw something. Spent the whole night clinging to me like a little monkey. Had to peel him off my back this morning.”

  “You got to stop worrying,” Mary Kate said now to Venita. “The Lord going to bless you. He got something good planned for you.”

  “You really think so?” Venita asked. She was calmer. The storm inside her was blowing over.

  “Look what he did for Sarah.”

  “Who Sarah? She live ’round here?” Venita asked. Just then they heard a crash in the living room.

  “Something broke,” Dorene called out.

  “Something broke, my foot. What you done touched I asked you to let ’lone?” Mary Kate said. “Come on in here and bring the baby.”

  Dorene appeared at the kitchen door holding a squirming Mary. “It ain’t enough you girls make a mess at home, but you to come to somebody else house tearing up. I’m a whip you.”

  “Don’t do that,” Venita said. “Come here,” she said to Dorene. “I’m a clean up the mess. It ain’t nothing but a accident, right baby?”

  Dorene nodded her head, and when she caught her mother looking at her, added, “Yes, ma’am.”

  Venita sat down on a kitchen chair and pulled Dorene up on her lap. “What you was saying ’bout Sarah?”

  “Sarah from the Bible,” Mary Kate said, and eased herself down on a chair. Mary climbed into her lap. “The Lord blessed her.”

  Venita remembered the story. The Lord had opened up her womb when she was an old woman. “You think he can do it for me?”

  “He got something good planned for you.”

  Venita smiled and hugged Dorene close to her.

  “I got a taste for something sweet,” Mary Kate said. “I got some corn bread at home. We could have that with some Alaga. Would you like that?” she asked Venita.

  “I would. I ain’t had bread and syrup in a long while, since I came north.”

  “My mama call it a hard-time dessert, but it’s all I got.”

  On the walk over to Mary Kate’s, Venita couldn’t help smiling. Mary Kate was blessed. She must know. There was no need to worry. Mary Kate had to know.

  If the truth be told, Mary Kate did not know. All she knew was that when she lay with her husband she came up pregnant. Her mother had told her that. “You lay down with a man, you come up with a baby.” It was just that simple.

  Venita knew this. She knew babies did not come from cabbage patches, but from men. But what Venita did not think of, what she had never thought of, was going to a doctor. There was nothing a doctor could do. He could not give her a baby. All there was for her to do was wait. When it was time, a child would come to her.

  11

  Extinguished

  HENRY HAD come back from Vietnam with a scarred face. It looked like melted plastic. It was shiny and the skin was thick. Half of his hair had been burned away. Some of the children called him Halloween.

  Samuel talked to him in the Red Store a week after he returned. “I hear it was napalm.”

  “Yeah, it was. It came from a flame thrower. I never knew what hit me,” Henry said. “I found out when I was in the hospital.”

  Dorene was with her father that day. It was early evening, and as they had walked across the field to the store, a yacht of a car floated up Holbrook toward the pike.

  When the car passed, Dorene began singing a song to herself. She sang it over and over until she saw Henry. In the store, while her father spoke, she hid behind him. She was too young to remember Henry’s slick hair, his smooth skin. She was born the year he went to Vietnam.

  Two weeks after Dorene heard Henry talking about napalm, she still hid under a blanket when the evening news came on.

  Mikey watched, her parents watched, and sometimes even Mary watched. But as the black-and-white Motorola played in the living room, Dorene hid. She had to protect herself from the ugly. She did not even want to listen to news of the war. But she could still hear it in the kitchen, and she was scared to go upstairs by herself, so she lay on the couch and heard Walter Cronkite, tried not to listen to Walter Cronkite, and protected herself from the ugly. She could hear the bombs exploding and the machine guns firing in the living room. And then there was the napalm. It fell from the sky on the Vietnamese children, and it made them ugly.

  Dorene knew it was white men who told these war stories. They came on every night to tell what was happening. She knew what was happening. Napalm was being dropped on some little, stupid Vietnamese children. Dorene thought Vietnam was probably close. Maybe you could get there on a bus. She was afraid war would come to All-Bright Court. She was afraid a white man would come here and tell war stories, that her mother would be seen on television, running down the street holding her limp, ugly body.

  For the last two week
s while Dorene lay hidden under her blanket, listening and not listening, peeking when she dared, Newark and Detroit had burned. Sixty-six people were killed. Dorene pushed events together, the sirens, the looting, the men in uniforms, the white reporters, the talk of angry Negroes. Everything was one.

  While Mikey and Mary played with the baby Olivia, their mother would say, “Unh, unh, unh” or “Will you look at that, Samuel. Negroes done gone crazy. This don’t make no sense.”

  He did not answer. Once, Dorene peered out, expecting her father to be asleep, expecting her mother to be talking to the walls. But her father was awake, sitting on the edge of his chair. He looked as if he were about to cry.

  On this night, again, Dorene was ready for the war. Before the news started, she asked softly from under the blanket, “Daddy, do napalm make you ugly?”

  “No, Little Bit, it kill you,” her father said.

  “You sure it don’t make you ugly?”

  “I told you, it kill you. What make you think it make you ugly?”

  “’Cause it didn’t kill Henry. It made him ugly,” Dorene said. “He say napalm fell on him. Didn’t he used to have a face, Daddy?”

  “Sure, he had a face. He still got one.”

  “No he don’t. He got a Halloween mask,” Mikey said.

  “Don’t say things like that,” Mrs. Taylor said.

  “It’s true,” Mikey said. “All the kids be calling him that.”

  “Well, don’t you be calling him that. If I hear you call Henry out his name, I’m a beat your ass,” Mr. Taylor said.

  “How napalm make Henry ugly?” Dorene asked.

  “He got burned. That stuff burned him. Henry like to died in Vietnam.”

  “I never seen him on the news, Daddy. Why wasn’t he on the news?”

  “They don’t be showing the whole war on the news. If they did, it would be all they showed. The war go on day and night.”

  Dorene asked, “They going drop napalm here?”

  “Naw. Vietnam way on the other side of the world. There won’t be no war here. We safe here.”