Now, at least, she no longer had to fight bitterly with her pompous, self-satisfied, driven, blaspheming husband, who worked seven days a week, sixteen hours a day, money-grubbing and mean though—outwardly— flamboyantly generous; a man who lost interest in her bed after her first and only son, Thomas, Jr., arrived broken in heart, spirit, and brain upon delivery; a son whose only true achievement in life was to illegitimately produce Edward by some equally brainless waif of a girl, now long vanished; a son who practically thrust the few-week-old infant into Maggie’s arms, then flew off to a life of waste, sloth, petty crime, and finally a menial job in one of her stores and an ignoble marriage to a woman who could not conceal her greedy wish for Maggie to die.
Her life now was life that no longer had bite or spit or fire. She no longer worked. She no longer had to worry about Thomas’s philandering and what pretty young thing he was messing with now. She no longer had the little boy whom Providence seemed to have sent her to maintain her sanity, to moor her to the Earth, and to give her vast energies focus.
In a world not real, is there truly guilt in willing reality to cohere through the life of another? Is that such a great sin? Maggie had turned to the boy—young, brown, handsome—to hold on to the world itself. She now saw that clearly. How did it happen? The mental slipping and sliding that allowed her to meld and mess and confuse her life with his, his rights with her wants, his life with her wish? He would not be like his father or his grandfather; he would rise up, go to school, be strong, be honest, upright. He would be; she would be…a feat of legerdemain; a sorcery of vicariousness in which his victory was her victory. He was her champion. Her hope.
Now he was gone. And now she had to come to terms with this news of his being “gay,” as the world called what she had been taught was an unholy abomination. Slowly it all came together in her mind’s eye: Edward.
He should have known better. I should have known better. I must learn better.
VII
They stood there At the end of the row, all of them waiting for the tractor to arrive and for the Reverend Hezekiah Barden to save the soul of Morton Henry.
Morton saw them standing there from his mount atop the green John Deere as it bounced across the broken soil. Maggie could make out the expression on his face: confusion. Three blacks and a white man out in the fields to see him. Did his house burn down? His wife die? The President declare war on Russia?
A big, red-haired, red-faced man, his face had so many freckles he appeared splotched. He had a big chew of tobacco in his left jaw and he spat out the brown juice as he came up the edge of the row and put the clutch in neutral.
“How you all today? Miss Maggie?”
“Hey, Morton.”
Barden started right up, thumbs in his suspenders, and reared back on his heels. “Now I spect you’re a God-fearing man?”
“Beg pardon?”
“I even spect you go to church from time to time?”
“Church? Miss Maggie, I—”
The Reverend held up his hand. “And I warrant you that your preacher—where do you go to church, son?”
“I go to—wait a minute. What’s going on here? Miss Maggie—”
Henrietta piped up. “It’s Sunday! You ain’t supposed to be working and plowing fields on a Sunday!”
Morton Henry looked over to Maggie, who stood there in the bright sun, then to Gabriel, as if to beg him to speak, make some sense of this curious event. He scratched his head. “You mean to tell me you all come out here to tell me I ain’t suppose to plow this here field?”
“Not on Sunday you ain’t. It’s the Lord’s Day.”
“‘The Lord’s Day’?” Morton Henry was visibly amused. He tongued at the wad of tobacco in his jaw. “The Lord’s Day.” He chuckled out loud.
“Now it ain’t no laughing matter, young man.” The Reverend’s voice took on a dark tone.
Morton seemed to be trying to figure out who Gabriel was. He spat. “Well, I tell you, Reverend. If the Lord wants to come plow these fields I’d be happy to let him.”
“You…” Henrietta stomped her foot, causing dust to rise. “You can’t talk about the Lord like that. You’re using His name in vain.”
“I’ll talk about Him any way I please to.” Morton Henry’s face became redder by the minute. “I got two jobs, five head of children, and a sick wife, and the Lord don’t seem too worried about that. I spect I ain’t gone worry too much about plowing this here field on His day none neither.”
“Young man, you can’t—”
Morton Henry looked to Maggie. “Now, Miss Maggie, this is your land, and if you don’t want me to plow it, I’ll give you back your lease and you can pay me my money and find somebody else to tend this here field!”
Everybody looked at Maggie. How does this look, she couldn’t help thinking, a black woman defending a white man against a black minister? Why the hell am I here having to do this? she fumed. Childish, hypocritical idiots and fools. Time is just slipping, slipping away and all they have to do is fuss and bother about other folk’s business while their own houses are burning down. God save their souls. She wanted to yell this, to cuss them out and stomp away and leave them to their ignorance. But in the end, what good would it do?
She took a deep breath. “Morton Henry. You do what you got to do. Just like the rest of us.”
Morton Henry bowed his head to Maggie, “Ma’am,” turned to the others with a gloating grin, “Scuse me,” put his gear in first, and turned down the next row.
“Well—”
Barden began to speak but Maggie just turned, not listening, not wanting to hear, thinking: When, Lord, oh when will we learn? Will we ever? Respect, she thought. Oh how complicated.
They followed Maggie, heading back to the house, Gabriel beside her, tall and silent, the afternoon sunrays romping in his black hair. How curious the world had become that she would be asking a white man to exonerate her in the eyes of her own grandson; how strange that at seventy, when she had all the laws and rules down pat, she would have to begin again, to learn. But all this stuff and bother would have to come later, for now she felt so, so tired, what with the weekend’s activities weighing on her three-score-and-ten-year-old bones and joints; and she wished it were sunset, and she alone on her patio, contemplating the roundness and flatness of the earth, and slipping softly and safely into sleep.
JACQUELINE WOODSON
[1963–]
BORN IN COL UMB US, OHIO, CHILDREN’S BOK WRITER AND young adult novelist Jacqueline Woodson divided her childhood between her grandmother and older siblings in North Carolina and her mother, living in Brooklyn. The earliest recognition of her literary gifts came in fifth grade, when she won a contest for a tribute poem to Martin Luther King, Jr. Her first “lesbian-related” writings, however, were love letters to other teenaged girls. Eventually, Woodson came out as a lesbian in a creative writing class at New York’s Adelphi University, from which she graduated with a degree in English literature in 1985.
Woodson’s first job after college was working for a children’s book company, where she was encouraged by a coworker to write her first book, Last Summer with Maizon (1990). Later, this story about best friends Margaret and Maizon developed into the trilogy that includes Maizon at Blue Hill (1992) and Between Madison and Palmetto (1993). Her other popular works include I Hadn’t Meant to Tell You This (1994), named a Coretta Scott King Honor Book in Fiction, and her Lambda Award–winning novel for adults, Autobiography of a Family Photo (1995). Woodson has been a fellow at the MacDowell Colony and at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Massachusetts, as well as a recipient of the Kenyon Review Award for Literary Excellence in Fiction.
Noted for effectively incorporating controversial subject matter such as racism, substance abuse, and AIDS into her work, Woodson is also one of the first writers of color to explicitly address homosexual themes in young adult fiction. Her eighth novel and Scholastic Books’ first gay publication, From the Notebooks of Melani
n Sun (1995), explores lesbianism from the point of view of a thirteen-year-old African American named Melanin, whose mother has recently begun dating a white woman.
FROM FROM THE NOTEBOOKS OF MELANIN SUN
[1995]
I was sitting at my desk going through my frog stamps when the phone rang a few hours later. “Can I speak to Melanin Sun?” a girl’s voice said. “This is Mel.”
“Well, this is Angie.”
“What’s up, Angie?” I said, then immediately regretted it. It sounded rehearsed because it was. I had dreamed this moment a million times and now here it was. And she was calling me. Maybe that made me lame, though, ’cause I should have been the man about it.
Angie laughed nervously.
Breathe, Mel. Start all over. “So what’s up?”
“Nothing,” Angie said, “I was just calling to say hey.”
We were silent for a few moments. I couldn’t think of a single thing to say. Stupid.
“Oh, well,” Angie said. “I just wanted to say hello. It’s hard to talk to you in person since you’re always with your friends.”
“Sometimes I’m not.”
“Like when?”
I thought for a moment. “When I’m in the house.”
I looked out the kitchen window. It was cloudy again. Would Angie run screaming from here if she knew about Mama? Would she ever speak to me again? What was the use of even talking to her, I wondered, if the minute she found out, she wouldn’t even pick up the phone to dial my number?
“What are you doing?” Angie asked.
“Nothing.” Breathe, Mel. Breathe. “Collecting stamps and stuff…of endangered species. I’m holding one of a Corroboree.” Stupid, stupid me. “S’cuse me?”
“Corroboree, bufo bufo, golden toad…”
“You sound like a crazy person.”
I smiled, embarrassed. She had a nice voice. “Frogs. I know you probably don’t think of them as animals…”
“They’re amphibians.”
“They’re vanishing,” I said.
“Oh.” The line grew silent again. I wondered if Angie was thinking I was crazy. I didn’t care. If she didn’t like the way I thought about things,
she didn’t have to call anymore. The heck with her. The heck with everyone.
“I like all the insects and animals and amphibians that are almost extinct or already extinct,” I said, kind of giving up on everything.
“Oh,” Angie said again. This time it was a different “oh,” like maybe she understood a little better. “Save the world stuff.”
I swallowed. What would you say, Angie? Tell me what you’d say if you knew. “Not saving it,” I said, twisting the phone cord around my thumb. “I don’t think anybody can do that ’cause it’s already over the edge.”
“Yeah,” Angie said. “Isn’t that messed up?”
We talked for a while longer but it was hard to think of anything except Angie finding out about Mama.
“We should hang out sometimes,” Angie said.
“Yeah,” I said. “I was gonna call you. Ask you if you wanted to hang out.” “Yeah?” Angie said. “That’d be cool.”
After we hung up, I went back into my room and raised the window. It was gray out now, and quiet. Sitting down on the window ledge, I looked up at the cloudy sky. The amphibians are vanishing, I kept thinking. Angie. Angie. Angie. I felt like throwing up. I wanted to kiss her. What would it feel like? What would I feel like? Would we fall in love? Maybe. Maybe it could happen.
“Are you ever going to let me read anything in those notebooks?” Mama had asked. And I should have said, No! Maybe, Hell, no! I should have said, These are the only things I have that are mine, all mine. The only things I have that won’t mess my life up by being gay. The only things that won’t stop calling me if they find out.
Angie. Angie. Angie. I didn’t want to hope too much. She was going to find out some way sooner or later. But she had called me. And she hadn’t laughed when I told her about the amphibians. Maybe, I couldn’t help thinking. Maybe.
I picked up the phone and dialed. She answered after the first ring. “Angie,” I said. “Maybe we could hang out now.”
It was raining again and cold, so the park was empty. Angie pulled her jacket closed, over those breasts, hiding those breasts. I remembered something stupid Mama had said—It’s okay to be nice to women—so I wiped the bench dry with my jacket before we sat down. Angie moved closer
to me. So close, our shoulders were touching. Then I was shivering. Not from the cold but from something—shivering from the inside out. We didn’t say anything for a long time. Watching the rain. Watching the empty park. Trying hard not to look at each other.
“I always thought you were cool, Mel,” Angie said.
“Yeah,” I said, kind of glancing at her but mostly looking straight ahead. Sitting on my hands and looking straight ahead. “I thought that about you.” I tried to sound calm, but the words came out shaky, like they were barely on the tip of something in the back of my throat. I know it sounds like a lie, but I leaned over and kissed her then, quick so that I wouldn’t be thinking about it. So fast my teeth bumped her lips. Stupid, stupid me.
Angie laughed. She closed her eyes when she laughed and I had never seen anybody laugh like that. It made me smile, from someplace deep that I had forgotten about.
“You never kissed anybody before?”
“I kissed lots of people,” I said, sitting up straighter, looking off.
“No you haven’t,” Angie said. When I glanced at her again she was looking at me, straight on. She knew I was lying.
“I been kissing girls since I was ten,” I said.
“Lie number two,” Angie said, laughing.
I swallowed. No, Angie. Lie number three. There’s another one. Bigger and worse.
We didn’t say anything for a long time, looking off, watching the drizzle, slick against grayblack ground. Rain dripped from the hoops. I thought of the hollow bounce of a basketball and the sound repeated itself in my head—over and over. And the silence filled us up.
“I don’t have a lot of friends,” Angie said quietly, after a long time had passed. “You mad at me for teasing you?”
I shook my head. “It’s nothing.” I felt lame making her think I was mad.
“Sometimes I don’t know the right things to say,” Angie said. She wiped her chin with the back of her hand. “I talk to myself a lot. You don’t have to worry about saying the wrong things to yourself.” She smiled a little bit, the corners of her mouth turning up, but nothing else about her face changed. I wanted to hold her hand. I wanted to know what it would feel like to have her fingers against my palm. “I’m kind of to myself mostly,” she said. “It’s better that way.”
I nodded, taking my hands from beneath my legs and staring at them. I can palm a basketball, almost. Ralphy says it’s about control and muscle. Maybe I had weak hands.
If I was a real liar I would say I took Angie’s hand then, that I leaned over and kissed her again. But it didn’t happen that way. She kissed me. Maybe that was okay because only for a little while did I think about Mama and Kristin kissing and then, after that, it was Angie, all Angie. Beautiful, beautiful Angie.
We kissed for a long time. When we stopped, we just sat there, a little bit embarrassed. It was like all of the words went out of us. Maybe we didn’t need any right then.
The rain had started coming down harder, but it didn’t seem as though Angie was in any hurry to get out of it. Something about her sitting there, like nothing mattered, like it wasn’t even raining, made me want to tell her everything. But I just shivered and continued looking straight ahead.
“I don’t have a lot going on,” I said. “I, you know, collect my stamps and watch some TV and write…”
“Poetry?”
I shook my head.
“I write some poetry sometimes,” she said softly. “Stuff about life and my family.” When I looked at her, she was smiling. Looking at me and
smiling.
“What’s your family like?” Maybe she had a dyke mother, too. Maybe this was the perfect ending.
“Mother, father, sister, sister, brother, brother, brother,” Angie was saying. I felt myself closing up, switching off—like a light with a dimmer switch. She would run screaming if she knew. Screaming, screaming, back to her big, big family. Back to her normal life.
Toward the middle of August, it got cold suddenly, and me and Sean and Ralphy ended up walking the neighborhood with heavy dungaree jackets hanging like capes from our heads. Ralph said seasons changing depressed the hell out of him. Sean was quiet, too quiet, and Ralph and I kept nudging him with our elbows trying to get him to say something. We finally gave up and the three of us fell silent for about four blocks. When we passed Angie, I smiled at her.
“Hey,” I said.
“Hey yourself,” Angie said back, falling in step with us.
I hadn’t called her since that day in the park. Maybe she thought I didn’t like her.
“Rasta woman,” Ralph said.
Angie rolled her eyes at Ralph. “Stupid. You’re the one with locks.” “Who you calling stupid?” Ralph raised one eyebrow.
“I’m calling you stupid,” Angie said over her shoulder.
“Leave her alone, Ralph,” I said.
Ralph was frowning. “She’s trying to be cute in front of you. I’ll show her who’s stupid.”
“Yeah,” I said. “Whatever.”
Angie and I walked bumping shoulders. Ralph and Sean gave us glances, but didn’t say anything. Sean was glaring. Maybe he was jealous. I took my jacket off my head and put it on. It was too big. Everything we owned was too big. “You planning on doing a lot of growing?” Mama asked last time she took me shopping.
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