by Lee Smith
Naturally, as I said, the boys started coming around, and it wasn’t long before I was going with one of them in particular, Hank Smith, and it wasn’t long before we were rubbing up against each other on the dance floor until I couldn’t breathe right, and it wasn’t long until I was sneaking out with him after hours, into the dry cleaner’s where he worked, that he had a key to, and laying with him across those big old soft tables where you press men’s shirts, and the streetlights came in the windows all pale and ghosty where the shirts hung on hangers all around. Maybe I knew, in some part of my mind, that this was wrong—I can’t say for sure if I knew it or not, though. I can’t say for sure if it was wrong or not, either. I was not real sure I wanted to be a good woman, anyway, as I said. Look where it had gotten Mamma!
When I thought about Mamma and Mamma Tampa up on Grassy Branch, it all seemed so long ago and far away, like somebody else’s life in another country. I liked Richmond, where the streets were full of people and the streetcars ran up and down and you could get your fortune told or buy a piece of hot chicken on the street corner or see a Negro tap-dance in a big box of sand.
I didn’t think about Chicken Rise church at all, despite how much time I’d spent there, for Virgie didn’t care if we went to church or not, and Hank Smith and I liked to borrow a car and take a picnic out to the James River on Sundays. Or sometimes we’d go to Hollywood Cemetery, which I loved, it was all cool and beautiful in there. One little girl’s dog had died right after she did, pining away for her, so there was this beautiful statue of the dog right beside the headstone. It was so sad. There were dead babies, too, lots of them, with little lambs or roses or angels on their graves. This is where I got the idea for my song “The Littlest Shepherd” from, you know it is about a baby angel that shepherds the lambs. We used to sit right on the graves in the soft mossy grass, and then I’d lay back, and then he’d kiss me. Hank Smith was a great kisser for his age.
Which was my age exactly, seventeen. He lived with his uncle and aunt, and sent half of his wages home to his mother, a widow in Danville. His daddy had been killed in the war, and Hank was an only child. His mother couldn’t work, she had palpitations of the heart. When his aunt and uncle told her how much time he was spending with me, she had a cousin drive her to Richmond to talk some sense into Hank. Of course she couldn’t, and went home mad, and when I’d missed three periods in a row, Hank and I got married.
I didn’t have the nerve to ask Virgie to come. Georgia was the only family member present, arriving by taxi at the very last minute. We were married down at the big courthouse by Judge Roy Reardon, solemn as God Himself.
Hank wore a blue suit and I wore a beautiful pale green wool suit with a matching green hat and a little illusion veil, all of which Hank had borrowed from the dry cleaner’s. Later he took them back and ran them through again, and no one was the wiser. I often thought about the people that owned those clothes, how surprised they’d be to learn they’d been in a wedding! I have two pictures taken on my wedding day by a Negro photographer down at the courthouse who did this all day long. Here we are with Georgia. Here we are just the two of us, holding hands. We look like children. We were children.
And yet I have to say, Hank Smith was sweet. He was no city slicker, but a nice boy whose whole heart showed in his eyes. He was not a boy for the long haul, but how can you tell? Georgia married not long after, and she’s still married—shoot, she’s a grandmother now! Live and learn.
After the wedding ceremony, which took only about a minute and a half but was one of the nicest wedding ceremonies I ever had, I have to say, because we were so young and so full of hope I reckon, we walked outside to find that it had started to snow like crazy, not a car was moving, and they had turned on the streetlights early. It seemed like a blessing, that snow. It made Georgia and Hank and me act like kids, running down the street throwing snowballs at each other in our fancy wedding clothes, giggling and whooping all the way home, the longest walk in the world, all across Richmond, to come in dripping and giggling and exhausted finally at the boardinghouse on Floyd Avenue, where Virgie had gotten real worried about us by this time.
“I got married!” I hollered, and then me and Hank fell in a pile in front of the fire laughing.
Virgie was not a bad sport. She took a good long look at us and said, “Well, I’ll be damned!” and then, “Congratulations!” She went upstairs and got some rum, and Mrs. Marblehead, who ran the boardinghouse, got out some fruitcake and made coffee, and one by one the others in the house came down, until we had a real party going on. It was my new husband Hank and me; Georgia, Virgie, Mrs. Marblehead; Mr. Ralph Johnson, a traveling salesman who wore a toupee; Miss Harriet Lumpkin, a registered nurse; a Mr. and Mrs. Livingston Hall from Baltimore, who were in Richmond on temporary business; old Mrs. Wright, who had lived there for years and years; and the pale little clerk, John Umstead, who never spoke a word. After a while we started to sing, naturally, and found that John Umstead had a wonderful bass voice, even better than R.C., and that Miss Lumpkin was a trained soprano. Miss Lumpkin really showed off on “Mighty Lak a Rose,” which Virgie played to everyone’s astonishment on the piano. I didn’t have any idea Virgie could play the piano like that.
The snow piled up outside, higher and higher, until the streets were filled with people marveling at it. It was the most snow Richmond had had in twenty years. Hank and I fell asleep on the rug in front of the parlor fire, and Mrs. Marblehead covered us up with a quilt sometime in the night and let us sleep there.
It was a fine wedding night, to my mind. We woke early on Sunday morning to the blinding glare of sunshine off the snow, and the wild ringing of every church bell in Richmond. I looked over at Hank to see if he was awake, and he was laying there grinning at me. He had floppy brown hair, and a cowlick that fell down over one eye. “Why does the Little Moron take off all his clothes and run out in the snow?” he said.
“I don’t know,” I said.
“I don’t know either,” he said, and then he kissed me.
When Mr. and Mrs. Livingston Hall left, Mrs. Marblehead gave me and Hank their bedroom, the biggest and nicest one in the house, overlooking the gaslight on Floyd Avenue instead of the back alley. The curtains in that room were made of Irish lace, and the light from the bay window coming through them at night cast a flowery pattern across us in the big old four-poster bed and across the whole room. It looked beautiful. It was the prettiest room I had ever been in, anyway, that’s for sure, with its antique chest-on-chest and a real oil painting of some castle in another country.
I didn’t tell Virgie I was pregnant until I had to, until I just couldn’t button up the front of my red-and-white-checkered dress. Then she guessed it. Backstage after the show one night, she lit up a cigarette and squinted at me shrewdly through the smoke. “Well, when’s it due?” she asked me.
“May, best I can figure,” I said.
“Goddamnit!” Virgie looked like she was going to cry, a sight I had never seen. “Goddamnit, Katie, why did you have to go and do this? You could have made it, you’ve really got something, something I would have given my eyeteeth for.” She gazed off through the smoke, tapping her foot. “You’re a damn fool,” she said.
Virgie kicked me out of the act two weeks later, replacing me with a Richmond girl named Ernestine Dodd, naming her “Petunia” for the act. Petunia wore my clothes and learned my jokes in no time flat. It was the strangest feeling, sitting out there in the studio audience watching her.
I was too big to work anywhere by then, so I just mostly laid on the bed with my feet up, reading magazines and fooling around with melodies on my guitar, picking things out. I wasn’t writing songs yet, but I was getting close to it. The bigger I got, the harder it was to sleep, and I’d often wake up in the night with a tune running through my mind so loud and clear I’d have to get up and write it down. No words, just the tune. I couldn’t go back to sleep if I didn’t write it down, the tunes were as demanding to be born as the
baby herself.
Annie May came on the last day of May, with the weather so hot I’d done nothing but sit in a tub of cold water the day before to keep cool. Hank was at work at the cleaner’s. Thank goodness it happened to be Miss Lumpkin’s day off. She went with me to the little hospital over on Stuart Circle, where we had arranged to go, and I was in labor for nearly twenty-four hours before Annie May was born. It was awful. I named her Annie for Rose Annie, May for her birth month. In spite of my long labor, she was beautiful, not red or twisted like some of the other babies in the viewing room.
I held her out to Hank, who had not been in the room when she was born; they didn’t use to do that back then. I think the modern way is the best way, myself—let the men see how bad it hurts! Maybe they’ll keep that thing in their pants a little better after that. Anyway, Hank did not take to Annie May then or later. Maybe he was still too much of a baby himself to want another baby around. I don’t know.
“Looky here,” I said, lifting her little pink gown to show him all of her toes, little round perfect toes like pink pearls.
Hank looked out the window, sucking in his breath. “I reckon I’ll call Mamma,” he said.
“Well, tell her that her granddaughter is just beautiful,” I said.
“I sure will.” Hank sat and twisted his cap in his hands.
“What is it, honey?” I said then, for I could tell something was wrong.
“Nothing,” Hank said.
But still he sat there. Then he said, “Well, Katie, I reckon we are about down to our last nickel for sure,” not looking at me. “When do you reckon you can get up from there and go back to work?”
“Why, Hank, I just don’t know!” I said. He surprised me. I had been figuring on spending some time with the baby while she was so little and all. Then after a while, I thought, I’d try to get a job singing someplace around town. I wasn’t too big on joining back up with Virgie and the Raindrops again. But I couldn’t for the life of me see how we could be down to our last nickel, anyway, it didn’t make sense, for I had been saving up all those months while I was sharing a room with Georgia and pulling in that good radio money.
“Here,” I said. I handed him the baby, and he sat there stiff as a post.
“Mamma had to go to the doctor,” Hank said. “She’s been getting these headaches every day.” Well, I should have known! Mamma this, Mamma that. Mamma had to have the furnace fixed, Mamma had to buy new eyeglasses. Of course, Mamma was not but forty years old when she was widowed, but she had yet to show one sign of going out and looking for a job—believing, as Hank believed, that she was “not that kind of woman,” and holding fast to those palpitations of the heart.
Hank handed Annie May back to me in a hurry. “I’m late for work,” he said. “I’ve got to go.” He put on his cap and left in a rush, and the hospital nurse, a big Scottish woman who was right there in the room and had seen all of this, came over and hugged me. “My wee girlie,” she used to call me.
By the time Annie May and I came back to the boardinghouse, things had changed. Hank was different. He had a worried, tight look about the eyes now, and he went out a lot. He wouldn’t talk to me. He did not love to lie beside me in the bed as he had once, tracing the patterns of the lace on my body as I sang the old songs for him. Now when he made love to me it was a hard, fast act, almost as if he was giving in to something and wanted to get it over with as soon as possible.
I remember that summer now as a long bright stretch of time with me and Annie May alone in our room, yet I was not unhappy, because a baby is the best company in the world. I would sing to her all day long, the cuckoo song being her favorite, as it had been mine. I lay in the bed for hours just daydreaming, while Annie May pulled on my nipple. During the afternoon we’d sit at the bay window and I’d watch the life of the street, which I never tired of—the vegetable man from out in the country with his wagon full of corn, watermelons, beans, and tomatoes; his mule wore a floppy hat. “Sweet corn! Sweet corn!” he’d holler. He’d play a blues tune on his old flatbox guitar for a nickel. The three old-lady sisters across the street fanned themselves slowly in the heat all day long, all dressed up for nobody. Children, wild at being out of school, ran up and down the sidewalk with sticks and bats and balls, headed for a game someplace. The thin old man who lived on the corner was said to have been in the Civil War. He walked back and forth to the other end of the block every day, wearing a white linen suit. It took him an hour.
I’d play and play with Annie May, or just look at her for hours as she slept—her little fingers and toes, the tiny birthmark on her upper arm, her funny flyaway hair. She was just perfect. I wondered how she’d look as a six-year-old, or when she was ten, or twelve. I wondered what kind of a teenager she’d be—not like me, I hoped! I wondered what kind of a woman she’d be, where she’d live, what she’d do.
I loved that summer I spent in the boardinghouse with Annie May. I love thinking about it now, summers and summers since. Of course now I wonder if I knew somehow, in the back of my mind, what lay ahead, if that’s why I treasured it so very much. . . . Anyway, it ended in the fall. Hank kept pushing me to go back to work, as his mother needed this and that, so finally I just joined up with the Raindrops again, since it seemed like the easiest thing to do. Mrs. Marblehead found me a Negro woman named Sophrina Little who took care of Annie May along with her own children. Actually, I still got to spend a lot of time with Annie May since we didn’t have to be down at the studio until five p.m. for the Barn Dance, this was every weekday afternoon.
Sometimes Hank would stay with Annie May then, but usually I took her to Sophrina Little’s, which I always felt better about, for Sophrina’s children loved babies as much as she did, and Annie May got so much attention over there. Hank didn’t pay enough attention to her, I felt, just leaving her in her playpen or on a blanket while he read the papers or studied for a class. Hank was taking a self-improvement class that fall, he was real serious about it, and another class in accounting.
He was determined to make something of himself, so I reckon he has. People usually get what they go after. Whether they end up wanting it or not is another matter.
I always took Annie May to Sophrina’s on the mornings we did the Breakfast Club with Ed Barr, which was real popular.
We were getting real popular, in fact! Ernestine Dodd—Petunia—stayed on when I came back, so it was Mamma Rainette and three Raindrops now instead of two, and we sounded a lot better. Ernestine Dodd was a natural cut-up on the radio, in a way that Georgia and I were not. Later she went on to be Sally in Sally and Clyde, which was a famous variety act. They were on Arthur Godfrey, Ed Sullivan, you name it.
This was the fall that Mamma Rainette and the Raindrops made a record featuring “Git Along Home, Cindy,” which was our lead-in song, on one side and R.C.’s song “Living on Love” on the other. We got a lot of play around Virginia and the Carolinas, so much that Virgie started getting invitations for us to come and play different events, shows and fairs and such, on the weekends. Of course this involved traveling, and I hated so to leave Annie May.
But Hank would say, “Go, go,” for we needed the money, he said, and I went, for I was still trying to be a good wife even though I was having my doubts by then.
I will never forget that Friday night when we got back to Floyd Avenue real late, it must have been three a.m., back from doing a show in Roanoke, and I tiptoed over to peep at my baby, switching on the light in the bathroom and cracking the door just a little bit first so I could see where I was going without waking her up. I was surprised to see her turning her head back and forth, and kicking her feet—usually she slept like a little log. Her breath was coming in tiny shallow gasps. I leaned down and felt of her forehead. It was burning hot.
I pulled on the overhead light and grabbed her up out of her crib. Hank sat up in bed. “What the hell are you doing?” He was rubbing his eyes.
“Annie May is sick,” I told him. “She’s just as sick as sh
e can be. Get up, Hank, we’ve got to take her to the hospital. I think she’s real sick,” I said.
“Now just hold your horses, Katie,” Hank said. “She hasn’t got a thing but a little cold.”
“How do you know?” I said.
“I got Miss Lumpkin to come up here and look at her,” Hank said. “It’s nothing. Go to bed, let her sleep. She’ll probably be just fine in the morning.”
“I’m going to take her to the hospital if I have to walk,” I said.
“You are not! You spoil that baby to death, Katie, that’s probably what’s the matter with her anyway. It’s nothing, I’m telling you. Get in the bed. I’ve got to get up at six o’clock and go to work, in case you’ve forgotten.”
“I’ve just been working, in case you’ve forgotten,” I said, knowing it was a mistake, for I made more money than Hank, which he hated. “Go get the car keys from Virgie,” I said. We still didn’t have a car.
“Goddamnit, Katie, shut up! I’m telling you for the last time, we’re not taking this baby to the doctor for nothing. Nothing, you understand me? We ain’t got the money for it. You wait and see how she is in the morning, I’m telling you. There’s nothing wrong with that baby. “Hank never called her by her name, Annie May. He always called her “that baby.” He had a fixation that going to the doctor was a big waste of money—for us, that is. His mother went all the time, and furnished us with full reports—what she said, what the doctor said.
“If you don’t get up and take me and Annie May to the doctor right now,” I started, but then I didn’t know what to say next.
“What?” he yelled, bounding up out of the bed to stand in front of me. “What?” He pushed me into the wall, so that I stumbled back and nearly dropped her. I got real light-headed and scared, it was late and I was so tired.