I Been in Sorrow's Kitchen and Licked Out All the Pots

by Susan Straight

  Marietta hid her smile with her free hand. She loved to hear Baby Poppa’s studied voice, the one he used most of the time. He slipped into an everyday voice now and then, especially when he watched sports with the men on the piazza.

  “You will probably be as skeptical about this as you were about letting your sons stay with me when you first went to work,” he said now. “They’ll turn five at the end of May. But I’m betting you don’t have a birth certificate for them.”

  “What?” Marietta said. “You lose me now.”

  “They were born at home, right? And no one recorded the birth?”

  “My aunt. She pass now.”

  “That’s what I thought,” Baby Poppa nodded. “Well, they look older than they are. And they’re advanced, Marietta. They love to look at the magazines I bring home from the hotel lobby. They pretend to read the newspaper when I do.”

  “What you talk about birth certificate?” she said, frowning. What he want—he cain have em. No.

  “I think we should enroll them in school in the fall.” He walked with his head down for a moment, so that she could see the dent at the back of his neck, under his grayed hair.

  “School?” She saw eyes flashing past her, mixed up with the shine of the red-sparkled paint on the bicycles still gleaming in her mind. The dull, faraway blackboard… the stick across her palms… the voice of the teacher distant as an owl when Marietta stayed in the back row, refusing to look up or answer… the long walk, keeping herself apart from the others when they waited for Big Johnny’s truck…

  “Why I want em in school early?” she said.

  “I know what you think of school. I know where you’re from,” Baby Poppa said. They turned onto the narrow street and she automatically listened for Nate’s shouts and Calvin’s laughter, but it was cold, and they were inside with Tiny Momma, probably eating. “Marietta,” he went on, closer to her shoulder now. “I remember school, too. But this is different—this is a city, and if the teacher doesn’t have a thousand Negro children in one classroom, your sons might learn something. They’ll get a quicker start, and they learn fast. You’ve seen that more than I have. They are small versions of you.”

  She thought of them sitting on his floor right now, licking cookie crumbs—What he want? “You ain’t got time fe watch em, I find someone,” she said harshly.

  Baby Poppa said, “You’re assuming something that isn’t true. Listen—school keeps their energy harnessed, we hope. The field is full of kids who like trouble.”

  “You want em talk like you,” she went on, walking faster. “You think I cain teach em nothing.”

  He laughed, breathing harder to keep up. “Every Negro speaks two languages! You’re angry right now, and you’re talking differently. I speak the same number of languages as you—maybe Nate and Calvin will speak three.”

  “They suppose fe be six go to school,” she said, going ahead of him up the stairs.

  “You have plenty of time to consider it,” he said.

  She heard them through the window. “Mama on the stair,” Calvin said. “Mama comin.”

  Jesse and his friend Milton were groundskeepers at Charleston College, Tiny Momma told her. Baby Poppa asked if they would help with the bikes, and Jesse’s round face almost hid his eyes. “Oh, no,” he said, laughing. “Them two big old boys I seen playing gone have them some bikes? I plan to stay off the sidewalk for a long time.”

  His wife’s name was Colleen; her tiny son was Jesse Jr. Marietta sat in their front room for a minute, waiting for Jesse’s friend Milton, because they were expecting him. Jesse and Colleen’s apartment was larger, the whole top floor of the house, and the baby had his own room with a crib and tiny pillows. Colleen laid him down gently, and he trembled his hands to his mouth. Marietta bent over the crib railing to smell his breath. Nate and Calvin were asleep in their room, and Tiny Momma was listening for them while Marietta went to get the bikes. When she took in the milky-clean air rising from the crib one last time, Colleen saw her. “I thought I was the only one like to breathe that,” Colleen said.

  “I forget how that smell,” Marietta said, embarrassed. “Been long time.” When she and Colleen went back to the front room, the man named Milton was there talking to Baby Poppa. “Let’s go,” Jesse said. “Santa Baby and his helpers got things to do.”

  “Wait, now,” Milton said. “You didn’t introduce me.”

  “Yeah, yeah,” Jesse said. “This Marietta, she live next door. We on the way to get bikes she done bought for her boys. This Baby Poppa, you met him when we moved.”

  Milton nodded at Marietta. “Nice to meet you,” he said. She nodded back, turning away from his stare. So? She so big… she so tall… she so black… I know. You ain’t see nothing surprise me.

  She rode in the cab with Jesse, uncomfortable, while Baby Poppa and Milton perched in the bed. “How old are your boys?” Jesse asked.

  “Four. They five end of May.”

  “Little linebackers, huh? I see em out in the field. Wait till my boy gets out there, too. He’s gonna give em a run for they money.”

  “That a long time from now.” She smiled, getting used to his loud voice and wide forehead creasing. “He crawl for they money first, huh?” Jesse threw back his head and laughed.

  “Well, he gon do that good, too,” he said. “I want a tough one.”

  The two men put the bicycles in the back while Baby Poppa nodded. In the cab again, Jesse said, “I know they daddy proud of em, huh?”

  Marietta said, “They daddy dead, back where we come from. Dead before they come.”

  Jesse nodded. “Sorry. Well, he can still see em from up there, and he probably keepin a eye on em.” Marietta stared straight ahead at the dashboard, smelling the cigarettes and leather, clean and rich, no fish odor like Big Johnny’s truck. Sinbad, watching the boys? She imagined Sinbad driving, saw his face twist above her, a drop of sweat fall from his forehead onto her chest, his chin drop to her ear—the bouncing cab made the twist in her belly even sharper.

  “We takin the bikes to Baby Poppa’s?” Jesse said. She nodded. When they pulled up in front of the house, she saw that Tiny Momma had kept the shades down, in case the boys woke up. Milton and Jesse carried the bikes up the stairs and into Baby Poppa’s. When Milton came back out, he said, “Santa bring these bikes?”

  “I bring em,” Marietta said.

  He smiled. “Nice. My mama always gave us pajamas and socks.”

  “Mmm-hmm,” she said.

  “Maybe I’ll have to come by and see how they ride sometime.” He turned when Jesse came onto the piazza. “Hey, man, you ready?”

  “Yeah, we better hurry before Colleen gets mad.”

  Milton reached out his hand and said, “I’m glad Jesse got nice neighbors. I’ma have to see these boys sometime.” Marietta touched his palm with hers and nodded, going to her door.

  On Christmas morning, after the books and clothes, Marietta sent them down the piazza, saying, “Go get me some sugar from Tiny Momma. Hurry.” She followed behind them and leaned as they opened the door.

  “Bikes! Bikes! Look, Poppa! Wheels!” they screamed, and after they had danced around the spokes and tires, Marietta carried the bicycles down the stairs. Baby Poppa kept his hands on Nate’s handlebars; she held Calvin upright. Tiny Momma shook her head and said, “I think she crazy—got cars on this street and don’t look where they going. Gon knock they heads silly and we have to take em to the hospital. They just babies.” Marietta tried not to let herself grin, but she couldn’t help it when their hands shook on the rubber grips and Nate’s mouth fell open in rare silence. Then he tipped toward the sidewalk and screamed before everyone’s hands snatched him back.

  When she didn’t have a job, she and Baby Poppa spent the days with cold wind on their cheeks, shuffling next to the bikes until they were out of breath. Marietta could see Nate’s behind shifting on the seat, his frown as he tried to position his weight, and she felt Calvin’s hands pull on the handleba
rs to right himself when he swayed. They breathed so hard in their determination it was as if they didn’t hear anything she or Baby Poppa said; they would find out how to balance themselves. She sat on the bottom stair to rest, and Nate howled when Baby Poppa took Calvin up and down the street a few times while he had to wait. “Come on,” he said, trying to drag her up, and she shook her head. He got back on himself, but she jerked herself back onto the step. The old-woman voices in her head said, “He gon fall and crack his head! He be brain-damage—what kind mama you?” But she watched him fall slowly sideways onto the dirt of the yard, bouncing on his shoulder. He didn’t cry. He got back up and dragged the handlebars as he had her hands.

  They were exactly like her, in some ways—their faces when they concentrated, their impatience with instruction, the straight fall of their calves from their knees, their hair never growing away from their head but staying nestled and close.

  But Calvin loved the water more than Nate. When spring came, he would abandon his bike sometimes to squat in the filling gutter, building dams and watching the rainwater rush past him when he sliced an opening in the mud-trash barrier. He stalked the huge puddles in the field, ruining his shoes—he even lost several pairs when he waded into the mud, and Marietta couldn’t find the cheap canvas sneakers until the sun was persistent enough to dry the pools and leave the shoes bare and mud-crusted.

  She hardly ever had work on Wednesdays or Thursdays, and sometimes she would sit on the curb in the sun with Calvin, looking into the trickle of gutter water where he dammed it. He dropped stones and pebbles inside, and she saw how the water was clear and brown-bottomed like her creek. This he creek, she thought, touching the surface to make it shiver in the sun. She followed him to the field, where a ditch held greenish water, and insects hummed at the edges. “Bugs live here when the water come, and they go when everything dry up,” he told her. “Baby Poppa got a book show all the bug names—grasshopper, beetle, and all them kinda ants.”

  “Baby Poppa got a lot of books,” she said.

  “He always read,” Calvin said. “Tiny Momma watch TV.”

  Marietta nodded. She and Calvin walked back to the yard, where Nate lay on his stomach in the dirt, shooting plastic guns at Robert, Carmen’s son, who was ten. Two other boys from down the street hid behind the stairs, and Robert sneaked up on them, spitting bullet sounds from his mouth. “Y’all too easy,” he said in disgust. “You babies.”

  Nate said, “You ain’t hit me! Your head bald as Jesse Jr. You look like a baby!” Marietta laughed. Robert had his summer haircut, from his mother.

  Nate was as quick-mouthed as Sinbad, always able to look quickly and say the right thing, even to adults sometimes; Marietta had to tell him over and over, “You teeth need catch some breeze every minute? Stop you mouth now.” He and Calvin were darker, taller than any of the boys near their age. Nate walked with his shoulders back, telling smaller kids what to do and lecturing older ones if he could get away with it. Calvin circled him, watching, listening, always ready to back Nate when he was challenged. But it was Calvin who got pushed down one afternoon while Marietta happened to be hanging clothes on the piazza; Nate flew at the older boy’s chest, not head down but smacking breastbones, and they rolled until Marietta wedged her hands into the tangle.

  Her first thought of school had been of boys like Randy, and his shrill call “Monkeys!” But as Baby Poppa said, “Integration can’t make children go to school together. All that fighting over drinking fountains—you won’t see Charleston’s white kids drinking after ours in school hallways, I know that.” And he was right, she realized; all the women she cleaned for sent their children to private school now.

  She asked Carmen’s Robert where his school was, and followed him the three blocks and down the little side street. She walked past the building after that, when she went to the store alone or came off the bus by herself. But who could tell what was inside? On the playground, the kids screamed and ran in aimless and planned patterns during recess—so many faces, peach yellow and brown and darker brown. A few tiny faces black as hers, as Nate and Calvin. She saw Robert, and Eric and Shirley and Angie from down the street. But then bells clattered and the children disappeared inside, and she couldn’t imagine what the teachers looked like, or the rooms. They were warm, she thought, no woodstove and gold light coming through cracked walls, but they still had blackboards, and the backs of rooms, where too-big children had to sit, were still dim.

  She knew Baby Poppa was biding his time, letting her think, and she realized that of all of them, Aint Sister and her mother and Rosie, Tiny Momma now, only Baby Poppa had ever figured out who she watched and considered without saying, “Sneak and listen all the time? Just ain’t right how she do.” Tiny Momma still crocheted her talk, and Marietta listened right, but she knew sometimes Tiny Momma wanted more words to mesh in the air with her own, like different strands of yarn making a pattern.

  On a Sunday in late summer, Jesse brought crates of peaches for everyone who gave him a few dollars. She and Tiny Momma made preserves, boiling the new Mason jars and drying them, stirring the bubbled fruit in pots until the steam dripped from the kitchen walls and their foreheads. Then they let the filled-bright jars cool on dishtowels. “You gon put em up there next to that tea?” Tiny Momma said, sitting at the table.

  “Yeah.” Marietta smiled at her. “But we gon eat em. Don’t worry.”

  She went down to the lower porch, where there was a tiny locked room that had been empty for years. Jesse and Baby Poppa had found a used washing machine somewhere, and Marietta, Colleen, Tiny Momma, and Carmen had all given a few dollars to buy it together. She washed the boys’ clothes and hung them on a line strung around her corner of the piazza. Tiny Momma napped on the couch with the door and windows open to let out the peach-sweet steam, and Marietta sat on the ancient couch at the end of the railing.

  Baby Poppa had trailed a long extension cord to the other corner, where he set the TV on a straight-backed chair. The gloom of the piazza was enough in the afternoon for the square of the screen to flash. Bats rang when they hit balls, and Baby Poppa said derisively to Victor and Jesse, “That’s it—only action in the whole game. How can you even care about these slow-moving fools and this simple sport, Jesse?”

  Jesse said, “Look, it got strategy, too. Where he place the hit, or maybe he fixing to bunt. Football ain’t everything.”

  But Baby Poppa said, “It’s everything to me. It takes thought and muscle at the same time. I’m just passing the weeks here with you, waiting for the real season.”

  The kids had borrowed shovels and rakes and hoes from Jesse’s truck, and in the field they dug and heaped wet dirt to make walls and trenches. Marietta listened to the boys’ jeans drip water onto the wood and even way down onto the grass and dirt yard. She remembered that first summer here, when she had taken a heap of clothes out to the white-corded clothesline in the tiny backyard. A cluster of gray, faded pins hung at one end. She stood in the dust, pinning, and she saw streaks of mud along her palm, lines of mud on the white T-shirts. Puzzled, she leaned closer and saw a mountain of dust on each white plastic cord. No one had used the line for months.

  She rubbed at the dirt marks on the wet clothes. Then Baby Poppa came around the corner of the house with a jar full of bacon grease swaying dully inside the glass. “Good morning,” he said to her. “I can never keep up with this excess.” He looked at her clothes and said, frowning, “You’re not trying to hang those up, are you? I see the dirt. No one hangs clothes back here because someone will come in through the fence off that alley and relieve you of your garments, or your sons’ garments. Sometimes they can sell clothes.”

  “Steal clothes?” she repeated. He went to the back fence, which leaned crazily in toward the yard, and poured the grease carefully into a hole near the base of the wood. He brushed dirt over the hole with his shoe and came back to her.

  “People steal whatever they think they need,” he said. “You’d better ha
ng those on the piazza where you can watch them.”

  She pushed the wet clothes now with her finger. In the heat, they stiffened quickly. Baby Poppa still teach me, and I grown. Tiny Momma still teach me. Loretta have for teach me that first day in the house, how for clean right. Nate and Calvin know more than me cause they little and live here, they learn bout the city and swim pools and cars. They gon go to school next month.

  Nate’s face was sometimes hard as hers now, and Calvin rarely smiled. What did she want for them? They gon go school, get smart, know a lot more than me. They gon be so tall, so big, so black—like me. Like they granfather. What they fe do? They talk back to anybody—they never see no white people. Maybe they have big mouth, big shoulder, big head, and they get in trouble. Maybe they go work like Jesse and Baby Poppa, they have for see white men all the time tell em what fe do; they don’t crack they teeth, they lose some job. She listened to the men shout at the TV again; the boys were receiving long and detailed orders from the older kids about where the trenches should be directed.

  Milton pulled up in his old battered car, and she saw him look up at her and smile.

  “He sweet on you,” Tiny Momma said, right behind her, and Marietta started. “He ain’t a bad man. Work over there to the college, on the grounds, that steady work. He seem real nice.”

  “You scare me,” Marietta said, and Tiny Momma smiled.

  “I scare you? Or he scare you?” She went into her doorway to get more ice tea, and Milton came up the stairs.

  “Nigger, you ain’t invited!” Jesse yelled. “This a private party—unless you got some beer!” They all laughed, and Milton held up the paper bag like a prize.