Baby Poppa left for work at seven, and Tiny Momma always whispered her slippers down the piazza to Marietta’s door soon after, when the boys had eaten. Sometimes Marietta would sit on the couch, watching them the way she had from her porch back in Pine Gardens, always thinking about their shoes, their wrists hanging too far from their sleeves, the cookies they craved. Sometimes she closed her eyes as Tiny Momma sat on a chair at the table and she heard Aint Sister, everyone, the voices it seemed would accompany each of her evenings for the rest of her life: the boys’ singing and arguing and scraping things across the floor, Tiny Momma’s chanted questions. “Them two ain’t dress for bed yet?” They sleep when I decide, Marietta would think resentfully. “You feed em some a that ham I brought the other day? What they eat?” They eat better than winter; they ain’t shrink yet, huh? “Look—Nate got a hole in his pants? Give em here, now.” I fixing to sew that when he sleep.
Marietta was silent, watching their round faces bobbing in the dim light, hearing the refrigerator hum and click when Tiny Momma had finally gone and the boys were asleep, waiting for the haunting radio to waft its songs through the walls. Old women gon talk all round me, always. Ax this, tell that. I raise Nate and Calvin till they weigh much as elephants and I ain’t do it right still. But that how they talk, old woman. When you turn a old woman, you hair turn light and you voice turn a question. She love them two, Tiny Momma—she want touch em, feed em. Long as I keep em—they mine.
Before spring, when the air began to warm and sweeten, women started to send word through Loretta and Tiny Momma and the neighbor women that they needed somebody to do heavy work, and they had heard Marietta was good. She became known as the one to get the day of the party or the tour, and the one for the mess of the day after.
She had three or four days’ work each week all spring. Washing wood paneling, wielding her toothbrush; gleaming the floors; brushing the dust from the carvings in picture frames. She ironed the linens, scrubbed grainy cleanser into bathtubs and sinks and counters. She left the windows so that the guests would see themselves, and she stared at the glass when the dark fell, seeing her own face barely visible, imagining the pale reflections that would look out into the night.
Sometimes she left in the dark with Tiny Momma, and if she stayed for a tour and then a reception afterward, always in the kitchen, she wouldn’t see the boys at all. They would be sleeping on the floor in front of Tiny Momma’s television, and she carried them to the bedroom, where she had a double bed now. They hunched close to each other on the cold sheets for a few minutes, and she stayed, thinking of the three of them sleeping in her mother’s old bed. Then she lay on the couch, listening under the window.
She scrubbed a white enamel sink one night, the double drainboard on either side with long ridges covered in gold flecks of chicken fat, peppery with dirt from scrubbed potatoes. She ran the cleanser-coated sponge down one ridge at a time, dipping hard into the scooped corner and sweeping down each row—like the even rows in the fields, hoeing in a straight line and beginning again, over and over.
Little Randy and his mother would be in Pine Gardens now, for the summer. She watched for them and for Mr. Thomas on the rare nights when she stayed during a party, but when she saw how nervous people were when they looked at her, how quickly adults glanced away, she realized that Mrs. Ray or Mr. Thomas would probably never see her. And children were always upstairs in these houses.
Pine Gardens—the fields of rice, corn, tomatoes, beans. Pinkie and Mary still moving up and down the rows—who worked with them? Laha’s kids were getting old enough now. Aint Sister’s house—how did it look, sitting near the granary? Or by the barn? The ancient fireplace must have crumbled when the house was moved. And her mother’s house, her house—maybe the vines grew tight in the shutter cracks, or maybe Mr. Ray had taken it, too, to make his own tiny slave street.
After one party, Mrs. Despres, Tiny Momma’s frail lady, ran to show Marietta water rings on two tables. “I can’t believe someone would be this careless!” she cried. “Everyone knows about my furniture! This table was my great-great-grandfather’s.” She took a cloth from Marietta’s hand and rubbed, her small hand whirling in circles, her face tilting up to Marietta’s. “Do you understand what I mean? These tables have outlived people. They’re a part of history. Two British generals sat and wrote letters on these tables!”
Marietta helped her rub out the faint circles until the wood shone clear as syrup again. Mrs. Despres touched her arm when she gave back the cloth, and Marietta was shocked at the coldness of the skin, at how Mrs. Despres trembled with fear that the tables were marred. “You want me help you up the stairs, ma’am?” Marietta said, afraid Mrs. Despres would fall. She supported her, both holding the polished banisters, all the way to the bedroom, with its tight spread and tiny lamp glowing.
Marietta walked slowly around the two rooms of her apartment that night when she got home. History. Mr. Thomas, Mrs. Despres live in history. Aint Sister thing gone but what I keep. She washpot with Laha, I hope. That washpot from gone time.
She remembered the pitted, coarse black iron of the washpot, and she went to the kitchen cupboard. The spider was there, the small three-legged circle of a cooking pot she had tucked in the bottom of one of the peach crates when she had packed that night, waiting for Lil Johnny. Why had she brought it? I think I might have fe cook outside, I cain find no place soon. Maybe cook in a field like cross the street. She ran her finger over the black roughness, trying to think of where she had seen that same metal. The wrought-iron gates—she had polished the brass nameplate on someone’s house wall, and when she stood close to the gates, which had always seemed so smooth and lacy, she saw that they were pimpled with pocks and rust.
The palm-trunk mortar was in the granary, or in Aint Sister’s moved house. History. She took down the Mason jars and wiped the tops clean. The colors hadn’t dimmed: silver-clear, deep red, gold, palest green. Tiny Momma had seen them several times and asked, “What you keepin them jars for? We might could use em for some preserves this summer, you want.”
Marietta had said, “I save this tea, I might need for drink sometime. Never know I get sick.”
“You been had it forever, seem like. I seen you sick couple times, but all you do is polish them jars.” She shrugged and cut more okra.
Who could she tell about Aint Sister? Only the boys had known her—and she was blurred-gone from their memories. My history. She walked around the apartment again, touched the tall vase-shaped basket, and ended up back in the kitchen, fingering the rice pot. Basket, pot, spider—all for work. No table, no old baby clothes press in boxes and lay out on little beds. No tiny boots somebody have when they small-small. No pictures. She opened the wooden box and sat at the table, staring at the picture of her father. One picture.
She spoke as little as she had to, even to Tiny Momma, who didn’t seem to notice when she came each night. She sang a few words to the boys now and then, but they talked to each other, happy to keep her legs within touching distance on Tiny Momma’s couch or her own while they played on the floor with the toys Baby Poppa picked up here and there. Baby Poppa watched her sometimes when he was home on the weekends, when they sat out on the piazza on chairs lined up to face the street and the field, where the kids played in the late fall heat. “I’m looking for the night spot to come free,” he told her. “Quiet, easy, leave you to yourself. I see you prefer that. Night man keeps talking about wanting better hours. I’m waiting.”
She was tired, more tired than she had ever been. She never knew if there would be enough money for the rent, and even though she worked enough days and nights to not hide from the landlady when she came knocking down the line of doors, each first day of the month frightened her. They ate the food Tiny Momma brought home sometimes. She thought about the job Baby Poppa described at his hotel, cleaning the lobby and the barroom in the early-morning hours when no one would have to see her, when no women would hover over and behind her to watch ever
ything she did, or jump when she came around a corner and gasp when they surprised her in a room.
But when she tried to think to herself why she was so tired now—maybe it was because she only sat at the table or lay on the couch when she was finished with the cooking and washing, with no field or yard to work, maybe her veins and muscles were locking up, like Pinkie always said—when she thought about why the hours seemed longer as she went up and down the stairs at the big houses, she thought in surprise that it was the quiet. No, it wasn’t her wrists aching from the wringing out of rags a hundred times, or her eyes stinging from ammonia, because she got used to that. The day of the party, cleaning, and the day after, the stains of wine and coffee in the tablecloths—she loosened the splashes of color with a paste, washed them out, ironed the heavy linens. She rubbed the tables, swept ashes from the floors she had waxed, blew the breath from the air. At home, she washed the mud from the boys’ clothes, cleaned the brown ring from the tub, rinsed their shirts again. When she held them up to the light, the T-shirts white and dripping into the tub, she felt great satisfaction.
But she realized for certain one day, upstairs in a bathroom at one of the big houses, that it was the silence. She’d thought that couldn’t be true. Only the cloth squeaking on the counters, the mirrors, her still face appearing everywhere against the pink curtains and walls. It was a shock—quiet? No one sang or talked. Lord God—she missed those humming voices? Rosie and Laha and Aint Sister? In the fields, laughing over the rows, Rosie singing, “Someday he’ll come along, the man I love,” and Pinkie shouting, “You been with Big Johnny since you fifteen! What you fe say!” Rosie laughing and saying, “Like I beena say, Someday he come along, the man I love.” Everyone calling out, “Hush!” Mary snickering to the others, “And Laha say Miz Briggs on a diet. Don eat nothing but fruit all day.” “Lord God, I hate for be Laha and wash them draws this week!” “Hush, don be nasty!” “I ain nasty—I wash my own draws!”
The fish market—Sinbad’s spinning lines of talk around girls, and his cartwheels of laughter with the men. The chatter of customers and ring of the register. She missed that? She scrubbed the bathroom sink now until it gleamed, pearly and shell-like, and then she began to wash the mirror above it. Sinbad—he was never quiet; even when there was a lull in customers, he read from the newspaper whether Frank wanted to hear something or not.
She reached to the side of the mirror and pulled the edge toward her to grasp it better and rub into the corners, and a hundred marbles fell out, clanking and cracking into the porcelain sink, bouncing onto the floor and even out into the hallway. The sound froze her, each marble seeming to land against her teeth, glass on her jaw, hard and gritted as tooth and bone. They bounced and rolled forever. Why had this white woman planned to trap her this way, she thought in panic. Was there money in the medicine chest that someone had stolen before? A few women always let quarters peep from rugs, or left dollar bills in chair-cushion creases. Had someone told this woman that Marietta stole? She couldn’t move, afraid of the round glass that would pull her onto the floor and afraid of the woman whose running steps she could hear down the hallway now that the clacking had subsided.
Margaret, the regular maid, told her that night on the bus home. Mrs. James’s mother-in-law was at the dinner. She always made excuses to use the upstairs bathroom, to straighten her stockings or check her hair, and then she snooped.
“How you know?” Marietta asked, incredulous.
“Miz James tell me. Complain all the time in the kitchen bout her mother-in-law, thinking she hide things all the time and don’t tell her. Miz James in that kitchen complainin bout that woman so much I have to nod and uh-huh, cain’t get nothin done.”
“Why she don’t tell she mother-in-law stop?” Marietta asked, and then she thought. No, I never tell Aint Sister or Tiny Momma stop nothing. But who got time for play with marble like that? How she get em in there? She didn’t want to ask Margaret that.
Marietta heard the echoing rooms of all the houses when she walked up her street. She checked on the sleeping boys and sat at the table with Tiny Momma, who had cooked greens and ham hocks. Tiny Momma’s voice wove around her as she ate, talking about Nate’s new song—he loved to sing—and Calvin’s hole—he’d dug for hours since someone had told him he could dig to China. They were getting grown—past four now, five in a few months. The radio next door was a trickle when Tiny Momma took a breath before the next story.
For the first time, she began to look carefully at their hair, from the back, when they were talking to the gardener or the other maids. The stiff curls and cloud sheen of the older women, the flat sheets of long hair framing the faces of the teenage girls. Bristled short fur standing straight up on the boys’ heads. They were home from military school for the holidays.
The men had comb marks and stubble at the backs of their necks as they sat listening to cheering roars from the TV sets again, sometimes several of them in a den arguing about football during a weekend afternoon. She vacuumed in the other rooms with the same chopping motions she had used with her hoe, around the chair legs, in the corners, with the same familiarity that let her think while her arm swung: Defensive back? The noise of the vacuum gave way to her cloth, and then she could hear the sudden blare of shouts and cheers.
And the women who paid her, told her where to polish extra carefully—their hair sat in twists high atop their heads, or that smooth helmet with curls near their cheeks or shoulders. Their hair dryers were giant mushrooms that fit over their heads while they read; curlers in rows like sausage covered their scalps while they talked on the phone about which parties to attend for Christmas.
Once, the water wouldn’t drain in the tub she rinsed, and finally she pulled the stopper; the long stem that reached into the drain was caught by a tangle of long hair, wet and matted, green and muddy as weeds in the marsh. Mud! Dirt washed off their bodies, too. She tried to look at the arms and legs of the woman who paid her that night, but the skin was covered with nylon and sleeves. The long brown hair was tight-circled at the back of her head.
Defensive back. When the boys had stopped whispering and shoving in their bed, and Tiny Momma went home, Marietta closed the bathroom door so the light wouldn’t wake them. Then she took off her headwrap. Rubbing her scalp, washing her hair, lying in the tub water with her eyes closed, she imagined the warm water of the marsh, the long tangled grasses and reeds. Then she patted water from her ears and stood; in the cloudy mirror, her face was smooth and one-colored as always. Her hair was softer now than when she was a child, but not longer. She lifted the edge of hair near her temples with the comb, made the circle of close spirals even around her face. She looked too young like this, with the soft arch of her forehead free and exposed. She didn’t even like Nate and Calvin to see her without her cloth and set mouth. She didn’t like anyone to see her twenty-one.
She rarely had to whup them. She’d told each enough times that she would, but that wasn’t it. They seemed to see that everyone else was respectful, even slightly fearful and distant, to her face; standing next to Tiny Momma and Baby Poppa, her size and face were even more intimidating, she knew. She had slowly become Big Ma, what the children called her to distinguish her from Tiny Momma and the mothers. “Big Ma mean,” she heard the neighbor children whisper when she yanked Nate and Calvin into the apartment. “She don’t never smile.”
“Big Ma could whup anybody. Big Ma taller than yo daddy. So? She keep Nate and Calvin inside after dark. Big Ma mean.”
People nodded to her when she walked home from work or took the boys with her to the store or went with Tiny Momma to pick up sheets. The neighbor men who sat on the piazza watching TV with Baby Poppa during the summer days when heat wouldn’t be chased from the apartments, Joe and Victor and Richard, lifted their chins in greeting, or told her if the boys had been doing something they shouldn’t. Two sisters who had moved in downstairs, Carmen and Jean, worked at a beauty salon, and they smiled but didn’t speak.
But this Christmas, with the extra dollars she made working all the parties, she had bought them more than clothes and jackets. She had found bicycles with training wheels. Two. She didn’t want them to have to share everything.
She asked Baby Poppa to come to the store with her, since she would have to put some money down and pay every month until the bill was gone. They walked to where the bikes hung shiny and small, and Baby Poppa shook his head and smiled.
“Your sons are so tall and husky that nobody seeing them on these bicycles will believe they’re going to be five this summer,” he said.
“They daddy was tall,” Marietta said. “Higher than me.”
“I’d guess so. Well, we’ll have to get these gifts home somehow.”
“Wheel em, huh? Keep em at you place till next week?”
Baby Poppa said, “I have a better idea. You know Jesse, just moved into the house next door. The gentleman with the wife and new baby?” Marietta remembered: Jesse was about her age, square-bodied and smiling. He and another man wearing dark green uniforms had unloaded a pickup truck full of furniture and boxes while a woman held a baby in the cab.
“That’s his truck, the one he keeps parked there in the side yard,” Baby Poppa said. “We can approach him and see if he’ll pick up the bikes. I can keep them in the bedroom.”
Walking home, he said, “Well, I’m glad you asked me to accompany you today, because there’s an idea I’d like to discuss with you now.” Marietta kept her pace slow beside him, swerving to avoid people on the narrow sidewalks. “I bought the boys books for Christmas. Children’s books, at that same store we just left. The woman looked at me like I was crazed, of course, but I’m accustomed to that by now. When I open my mouth, I always have to decide how to talk to them.”
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