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

by Susan Straight

  Nate’s lips hung open with saliva and tears, and Calvin sobbed, too. She let them run upstairs to the apartment, and she went to Baby Poppa’s.

  “How I gon tell em not to fight?” she said, burying her head in her arms at Tiny Momma’s table. How could she explain to Baby Poppa, to the boys, about their faces? Her boys’ faces would never be right for most of the teachers, for white people, for other kids. How could they win before the blows by carrying themselves right? She didn’t know how to talk to them like that—they were supposed to learn from watching a man, doing what he did. And Baby Poppa, across from her, was a small red man with a beautiful voice—not a Cook with blueblood and her eyes.

  For once, Baby Poppa said nothing. All the way to work, she wasn’t sure if he was angry at her for beating Nate, or disappointed that she hadn’t let the older boy fight Nate to settle things.

  On Saturday, Baby Poppa gathered all the boys in the neighborhood at the vacant field. She watched them hunch over suddenly, combing through the high spring grass, and they collected sticks, bottles, rocks, cans. Pieces of broken glass were held aloft like prizes, and their pile on the street grew. Then Mr. Sims, who lived a few houses down, pushed his lawnmower down the street and began to cut the grass. It took him an hour to show them how, and then the boys pushed the mower up and down the big field until the green was short and thick. Not level, but they assembled and Baby Poppa shouted, “You need gloves and balls and bases for baseball. You need a court for basketball. But you all are big enough and smart enough to play the real sport—football. Let’s go.”

  She sat on the stairs and watched; from that height, she could see them running all summer in lazy circles and confused bumping. Then they learned a few patterns, and they began to fight over who should play quarterback. Baby Poppa let them all try, and Jesse got out there, too, with Jesse Jr. trailing along. Nate argued that because he was so tall he could throw the ball over anybody trying to defend him, and Baby Poppa only smiled. “We’ll see,” he said.

  Walking to work one late summer night, not a holiday, she and Baby Poppa smelled barbecue smoke hanging heavy in the streets. They came upon crowds of people milling about, women by smoke-wafting barbecue drums, even kids running in the dark. “The hospital strike,” Baby Poppa said. “Those women think they’ll get a dollar thirty-five an hour starting pay.”

  Marietta stopped by a lamp post to watch the people laughing, talking quietly, resting near buildings. She looked nervously for white people to career past in cars and wreck something, but only dark faces looked back.

  In the bar, Baby Poppa shook his head. “Those hospital administrators aren’t going to give them a dollar thirty-five,” he said. “They don’t have to. Marching, singing—oh, that was almost ten years ago, and white people are just as hard.”

  Marietta closed her eyes for a moment, saw Stan and Loretta, the white men’s thin lips pulled back so tight they disappeared. Baby Poppa said, “All that struggling we did to eat and drink and swim…”

  She interrupted him. “You were there?”

  He lined up magazine covers in a perfect stack. “Huh. I wanted to be, but my wife was afraid. She didn’t want to go, and wouldn’t let me. She said that was for young people, because they hadn’t seen enough to scare them off. Like we had.” He was silent, and she thought, I hope he don’t ax me. I young and still scare too much. Scare for everything.

  While she cleaned, she thought of Hosea Williams, the man that had lived next door all those years, the shadowy ghost who walked to the hospital each night. She imagined him demanding more money from a man with a face like Mr. Ray’s, but then, wiping down the windows and looking into the dark streets, she realized that Baby Poppa had called the strikers “those women.” She read the articles about them in the newspaper, saw that their faces were as impassive and faintly smiling as Loretta’s.

  She told Baby Poppa in the morning, “Come with us to see someone. You read about she, come today.” She took his shoulder, glad Tiny Momma was gone at work, and they brought the boys near the singing and pacing women to see the face of Coretta Scott King, Dr. King’s widow, who led the march. Her sculptured features, her set mouth, her hair waved away from her forehead—she reminded Marietta of her mother. Baby Poppa shook his head. “Impressive,” he said. “But white men aren’t worried.”

  The boys liked the carnival atmosphere, the food and kids everywhere, but toward evening the crowds grew angrier and rocks sailed through the air. Marietta and Baby Poppa hurried the boys home, and they went far around the strike when they left for work, because sirens wailed through the streets. “Boys carry rocks,” Baby Poppa said.

  But the women won. Marietta slapped the rolled newspaper next to his hand where it rested on the shiny bar table. “I’ll be damned,” Baby Poppa said. “They got the raise. A bunch of women.”

  Marietta smiled. “Women more patient than men any day. Stronger than you think.” She sat down. “And get they way without scream and yell, if they smart. I hear you yell at them boys in the field, want em learn everything in a second. I like em for see them women in the street, march patient.”

  Baby Poppa grumbled, “Your boys and the rest of them just want an excuse to try and kill each other. No finesse at all out there.”

  The boys weren’t a team, not even close—by early fall they were still a bunch of kids who ran around the field hollering. Baby Poppa and Jesse sent them down the grass to catch passes. Marietta heard Baby Poppa say, “Let’s be patient, now.” He rolled his eyes at her. “Marching women. Marching boys. Let’s run some drills again.” When he taught them how to block, the only one who could stand Nate’s blows was Calvin, and the two of them danced, hit, hugged each other all day. Nate tried to go around Calvin, and Calvin took the shove and turned, still facing his brother, covering him everywhere he twisted. Even after school began, Baby Poppa had them out on the lot whenever it wasn’t raining, and sometimes it was just the two of them, sliding past each other and leaping to catch the ball Poppa threw.

  She walked next door to Jesse’s with Baby Poppa and Tiny Momma, but when Tiny Momma and Colleen played with Letricia, who crawled and smiled, Marietta sat with Jesse, Joe, Victor, and the men to watch football. Nate and Calvin burst in from outside, smelling of autumn dirt and leaves, and Nate said, “See! I’ma be quarterback and tell everybody what they gotta do. I’ma call the plays like he do.”

  “What you want to play, Calvin?” Jesse said. “You want to be Nate’s wide receiver, since he throw like everybody ten foot tall? You the only one can catch what he throw anyway.”

  Calvin said, “Maybe.” Marietta smiled at him when he lay flat in front of the TV to watch.

  “You ain’t gon be no quarterback,” Victor grumbled. “Gotta change color for that. They don’t like no black quarterbacks.”

  “They got that boy over there at USC, in California,” Jesse said. “He’s tough enough.”

  Marietta liked the quarterbacks, the wide receivers, and runners, but the longer she saw the game the more she thought the heart of football wasn’t the throwing or running, but the players bumping in the middle, over and over. Watching the games each weekend with the men, she had found her eyes traveling to the ball, of course, but now she thought about the bigger men hitting each other and the gaps they filled or closed. Joe liked the defensive lines, and he argued with Victor about whose line was best.

  “Naw, L.A. got the Fearsome Foursome,” he said.

  “But Minnesota got the Purple People Eaters,” Victor said.

  “They got a stupid name,” Baby Poppa said.

  “Four brothers and a Swede—you seen em? Marshall, Eller, Page, and Larsen. Check em out—they the toughest.”

  She studied the defensive line, the way they got past blockers. When Marshall and Page smothered a quarterback, a finger of fear traced her spine at these huge black men crumpling a white man like that, throwing him to the dirt like he was a pile of cornstalks and then walking away without even looking back. />
  “Oh, man, I love to see Marshall do that shit,” Joe said. “Bart Starr ain’t no good. Johnny Unitas ain’t no Jesus. Marshall and Eller givin em a big nigger hug. Lemme see a brother throw that ball.”

  Mrs. Simmons hired her after Christmas, for a January Super Bowl party, she said. Loretta was still Mrs. Simmons’s regular housekeeper and cook, and Marietta told her in the kitchen what the boys and Tiny Momma and Baby Poppa were doing. Loretta had moved to St. Philip Street, where she and her sister had bought a house.

  “You watch football?” Marietta asked her.

  Loretta shook her head. “Don’t have time to fool around with that mess. Don’t nobody in my house like sports. All women by us!”

  “I ain’t seen Mrs. Simmons’ interest in football,” Marietta said. “This Mr. Simmons’ party?”

  Loretta raised her eyebrows and stopped arranging cheeses on a tray.

  “Huh,” she said. “You know better.” They both laughed.

  Everyone at home was watching the game over at Jesse’s, of course. Marietta put trays of crackers, cheese, olives on the long table; warming dishes of tiny sausages and meatballs and a fondue. Mrs. Simmons’s sister-in-law arrived early with her husband, and Marietta heard them arguing in the kitchen. Then Mrs. Simmons went past Marietta to talk to her husband, who was in the den, as usual. He shouted, “We’re having a dozen guys over here to watch a football game—why do we have a cleaning woman and a cook again, why do we have to get upset about which goddamn kind of napkins to put out and whether your brother remembered to bring a decanter?”

  “Because those dozen men are bringing their wives!” she shouted.

  “Well, shit, all we really need is two TVs and enough liquor for a Super Bowl Sunday. We don’t need wives—why don’t you ladies all go somewhere for a permanent tea, or an eternity of shopping?”

  Marietta smiled at Loretta in the kitchen. “Gotta have her hand in,” Loretta murmured.

  “Twelve couple is a party,” Marietta said. “Mr. Simmons ain’t learn that yet? I learn, and I ain’t even live here.”

  The women all sat in the parlor and the dining room; the men sat in the living room, where one TV played, and in the den, where the opposing team’s supporters watched another TV. Marietta caught glimpses of the game when she passed doorways to collect plates. She heard one man say, “Look at that throw—what an arm!”

  “And that little nigger can catch.”

  “The throw was on the money. Anybody can catch when the throw’s perfect as that one was. Hell, I could catch it.”

  “Norm, you better stick to catching shoplifters,” someone said, and they all laughed.

  Marietta smiled to herself in the kitchen, bending over the sink. All that undivided attention to quarterbacks and running backs—the real game on that line, she thought. Defensive line stop the runner, blitz that quarterback arm and whole body. Offensive line force the hole, give that white boy time for look who he pass. That the work, up and down the field, on the line.

  They couldn’t play in the hard winter rains. They squirmed in the small rooms, growing and growing, downing platefuls of food and entire cakes and pitcherfuls of lemonade when the weather warmed. She took all the parties and tours she could for spring, coming home from the hotel to eat Tiny Momma’s biscuits with the boys and Baby Poppa, walking with the boys partway to school and then taking the bus to the big houses. Like Tiny Momma and Baby Poppa, she never really slept, and so time passed too quickly while she napped on the couch or shelled peas and peeled peaches. Even now, she remembered Pinkie complaining, “I have fe go. I sit, I get all stove up, my vein stop. Have fe work.”

  She understood why Laha and Rosie used to complain about months slipping past when you had children, because in the hours of cooking and cleaning and washing, in the nights at the table with Baby Poppa and the afternoons at another table with Tiny Momma, time passed without her knowing. The boys were already ten, and nearly to her shoulders now. She measured the seasons by grass and football games in the field, then the games on TV with the men, and by the holidays. The February azaleas blooming and tourists filling the streets downtown. The heat of summer again, and school over to let the boys live in the field.

  Tiny Momma checked on them during the night, a spirit in her nightgown on the piazza, and if Calvin had a bad dream or Nate woke hungry, they went to her door.

  Marietta sat, tired after a long Saturday at a house on the Battery. She had washed out their pots and stove burners, dusted picture frames and glass china cabinets and moved all the furniture to vacuum behind it. Her feet were circles of bone on the linoleum now—round aches under the heel and ball and each toe when she stood up to go check on the washing clothes.

  When she sat back down, Tiny Momma had lain down on the couch. Marietta scratched her head. Even her fingernails hurt, throbbed all under the nail, through the pads, like the nails were pulling themselves loose from the bed underneath them. She stopped, pushed her fingertips under her scarf again, heard Aint Sister say, “Lord God, I so tired my fingernail hurt.”

  She’d always thought Aint Sister was just exaggerating—how could hard, horny shells hurt? What did they do to hurt? Wiping, plucking, wringing out—Aint’s nails had been thick and spooned as duck bills, squared and swollen. Her mother’s nails were so hard she’d trimmed them with a fish knife.

  Marietta sat entranced. The first thing she ever remembered about her mother, the first memory in her mind, was the warm mouth around her fingers, biting off her nails. They must have been thin as paper then, like Nate and Calvin’s had been when they were tiny. Putting her fingertips in her mouth one by one, she felt even the pressure and warmth of her tongue hurting them, the nails angry and pulsing. She took them out and blew on them gently, cool air against the wet.

  But she had saved enough extra money for the boys’ football uniforms.

  She went to Baby Poppa that night in the bar, in the gloom of dark wood and smell of beer and cigarette ends and perfume. “You remember you ax me why I like it?” she said.

  It took him a minute. “Football,” he finally said.

  “Mm-hmm.” She took out one of the Sports Illustrateds and showed him a picture. “Mean Joe Greene. Look—he ain’t smile. Look his face. I see those football player, black as me and bigger than anybody, like some people you know. They running over people, beat em to the ground, and white people love it, everybody love it. Scream and holler. Look my face. My daddy look just like me, my boy look like him.”

  Baby Poppa said nothing, just looked at the pictures, leafing through the worn, limp pages she had turned so many times at home. “You mean the intricacy of the game doesn’t matter?” he finally said, smiling at her.

  “Leave me lone,” she said. “You tell me they learn all they can in the field. They ready for that junior league you want em in.” She waited for a minute. “And maybe you ain’t need to be in that field so much then. You getting tired, huh?”

  He frowned. “Do I look tired?”

  She saw his chin up. “I never ax you how old you are. I worry bout you throw and run all day with them two.”

  Baby Poppa went back to the bar for a glass. He poured a tiny bit of something gold into the bottom of the glass and said, “You’re making me take to drink.” She waited. “How old do you think I am?” he asked when he came back to the table.

  “I don’t know,” she said. She didn’t want to guess.

  “I was born in 1900,” he said softly. “My child died in the same week I would have turned thirty. You’re not even that old, and you have boys playing football. How old are you?” he said, looking up sharply.

  “Old enough,” she tried to joke, but then she said, “I turn twenty-six this year.”

  Baby Poppa nodded. “Well, for all I know, you could have had gray hairs underneath those headscarves you always wear. Please don’t judge my abilities as a coach by my appearance.” He smiled and put his small, hard hand on hers.

  It wasn’t anything like
the frozen tangle of bodies in the magazine photos, or even the faraway views from the television. All the players were easily scanned on TV, and she could track the play, watch the movements of the line and the receivers all in a glance.

  Here, on a Saturday when she had refused a cleaning job, she stood beside Baby Poppa on a field and looked at the helmets, trying to watch Calvin as he crouched. On the sidelines at the junior league games, she could hear the cleats scrape the grass, hear the helmets clack like those marbles on the tile at first, and then when the heads banged inside, the plastic sounded heavy and hurting. The bodies fell hard on the ground. “Calvin get his man?” she had to ask Baby Poppa. She couldn’t watch right from down here; she wanted to be higher up, like she was on the stairs or the piazza when she watched them in the field.

  “He did,” Baby Poppa said, distracted. “I don’t know what they think they’re doing with Nate. I have a feeling they are going to use him as a wide receiver.”

  Calvin’s smile showed under his face mask and above his chinstrap. This time she concentrated on the line, saw him taller and wider than the defensive man, and he lowered his shoulder to glance the boy off so that he could chase the quarterback. “That how you show him all these time!” she said, and Baby Poppa nodded.

  Nate came in on the next play, and Baby Poppa said, “I thought so. He wants to be where he can get his hands on the ball, and he’s been trying to talk the coach into wide receiver. Look at him—he’s tall enough, but I don’t think he’ll remember the pattern.”

  Nate stood only slightly bent, and when the ball was snapped, he ran a pattern, but the ball went to the other receiver. Nate jerked his shoulders impatiently and she saw his pads move; he walked back to the huddle slowly. “He so impatient,” she whispered. It was three plays before the quarterback threw to Nate, and then the ball slid past his palms and hit him in the chest.