Mama Rocks the Empty Cradle

by Nora Deloach

  “I ain’t got no business—” Birdie Smiley muttered, as if talking to herself again.

  Mama glanced up. “Now, Birdie, Morgan is just fine now.”

  Carrie Smalls is a tall woman with a small mouth and a sharp nose. She holds her body straight, like she’s practiced so that her shoulders wouldn’t slump—I’ve told Mama more than once that it’s Carrie Smalls who gives strength to the three women’s presence, who gives a measure of credibility to what these three say. Carrie Smalls looks the youngest; she dyes her hair jet black and lets it hang to her shoulders. Now she looked down into Mama’s arms at the baby girl. “Where’s Cricket?” she asked, in an authoritarian tone.

  Just about that time, Koot Rawlins, a large woman known for being full of gas, swung into the aisle and belched. Koot’s shopping cart was full of lima beans, rice, fatback bacon, and Pepsi. She nodded a greeting but kept walking.

  I went back to staring down into little Morgan’s face. “My friend Yasmine, the beautician, she had a party a few weeks ago—a young woman named Cricket was there who told me she lived in Otis. Could she be this baby’s mother?” I asked.

  Mama’s attention shifted back between me and the baby as if she was surprised. “There’s only one Cricket Childs that lives in this town, and she’s Morgan’s mother, yes.”

  Annie Mae Gregory shook her head impatiently. “Where in the world is Cricket now?” she snapped.

  Sarah Jenkins looked around. “I declare, Cricket’s got her share of faults—”

  “Whatever Cricket’s faults,” Mama interrupted, “she’s a good mother. I can personally vouch for her devotion to this child.”

  Carrie Smalls shrugged. “I reckon you think ’cause your job throw you to be with her that you know her better than anybody else. My question now is where is Cricket, and why is she letting her baby cause so much confusion in this grocery store?”

  “Cricket isn’t far,” Mama said, convincingly. “She must have left Morgan with Birdie for just a few minutes.”

  Carrie Smalls motioned to her two companions that it was time for them to leave. “You work for the welfare, Candi,” she told my mother. “You know better than anybody else that if Cricket doesn’t take better care of her child, it’ll be your place to take her away from Cricket and put her in a home where she’d be properly taken care of. A grocery store ain’t no place to drop off a child—”

  “I don’t think it’s fair to say that Cricket dropped Morgan off in the store,” Mama pointed out. “Birdie is taking care of the baby.”

  Carrie Smalls responded sharply, “There are times when Birdie can’t take care of her own self, much less take care of a hollering baby!”

  I watched the three women shuffle down the aisle toward the fruit and vegetables. But Mama ignored them. She was still staring at the baby in her arms. “We’ll find your mama, sweetheart,” she whispered. Her words seemed to hold the child’s attention.

  Suddenly, I decided I shouldn’t be a part of this scene. Let me explain. I—I … well, I just don’t have a very strong maternal instinct. Don’t get me wrong, that doesn’t mean I don’t like babies—it’s just that they don’t turn me on like I’m told they are supposed to do!

  My girlfriend Yasmine, the one I told you about who fixes hair, is a voluptuous young woman who had her nose job long before plastic surgery became a part of black folks’ thing. Yasmine is about my age, unmarried, no children. And like me, she’s in a monogamous relationship. Her friend’s name is Ernest and while Yasmine won’t admit it, I know she wants Ernest to ask her to marry him so that she could have a house full of babies. Yasmine and I could be walking inside the mall, she’ll see a baby and her eyes will light up. She starts with “ain’t she cute,” or “she’s so precious,” going on and on until I feel like I am going to gag. If the mother of the baby allows, Yasmine even starts talking gibberish that she swears the baby understands.… The whole thing drives me crazy!

  I’ve told Yasmine over and over again that the strong feeling for motherhood that she claims is normal just ain’t there for me. “Girlfriend,” she says, “something is seriously wrong with any black woman that ain’t turned on by a baby!”

  I have to admit there are times when I find myself wondering whether Yasmine is right. For instance, as Morgan’s eyes drew me to her like a bee to honey, I found myself wondering what it would be like to have a daughter, and perhaps to have the kind of relationship with her the same as Mama has with me. That thought scared me. After all, I wasn’t Candi Covington. How could I be sure that I could pull off the maternal thing as successfully as she had? Anyway, I didn’t want to dwell on that thought, so I decided that seeing Mama hold tiny Morgan to her breast, hearing her speak soft, kind words, and seeing Morgan respond with a bubble of spit and cooing sounds wasn’t what I needed to be watching right now.

  Birdie Smiley, whose bottom lip trembled and who hadn’t spoken since Sarah Jenkins, Annie Mae Gregory, and Carrie Smalls had moved on, now stepped backward, knocking down a few cans from the shelf.

  Mama didn’t look at Birdie. “Morgan,” she was saying, “you are a pretty little thing, now aren’t you?”

  I remembered I wanted some Famous Amos so I turned and walked toward the cookie row. I stopped for a moment to taste the sample of vanilla pudding a demonstrator was handing out. I nodded, thinking of how the pudding would go well with the cookies that I’d already decided I was going to buy and stash in the trunk of my car.

  A few minutes later, I was standing in the ten-items-or-less checkout line when I saw Sheriff Abe, his deputy Rick Martin, and Cricket Childs run into the store like they were going to put out a fire. Something was wrong. I decided to forget about paying for the cookies.

  In the back of the store, a crowd had formed around Birdie, Mama, Morgan, Sheriff Abe, Deputy Rick Martin, and Cricket. I had to push past Sarah Jenkins, Annie Mae Gregory, and Carrie Smalls just to get next to Mama, who still held Morgan. Snatching the baby from Mama’s arms, Cricket was glaring at Birdie Smiley as if she knew it wasn’t Mama who meant her baby harm. “You’ve got a serious problem, crazy woman!” Cricket yelled.

  Birdie’s slightly crossed eyes had a pitiful look in them.

  Cricket tapped her forehead. “You stole my baby from my car in broad daylight!”

  Mama’s eyes widened. “You didn’t ask Birdie to keep your baby?” she asked Cricket.

  Cricket’s nostrils flared; she held her baby close to her breast. “She stole Morgan from my car when I went into the Shell station to pay for gas! Thank goodness the lady in the store recognized Birdie’s station wagon. And thank goodness Miss Blanche drove up and told us that she’d just seen Birdie walk into this store with Morgan in her arms!”

  Spasms twisted Birdie’s plain face, like she had inner pain.

  Sheriff Abe motioned to his deputy to disperse the gathering crowd. “Okay, folks,” Rick Martin said, his voice rising above the loudspeaker music, an old Beatles song. “Things are under control now. So go about your business, go on with your shopping.”

  “Nobody is going to leave this store until Cricket and Birdie go!” Carrie Smalls declared loudly.

  Deputy Martin walked over and gently took Birdie’s arm. “I’m sorry, but you’re going to have to come with me,” he told her.

  “If you touch my baby again, I’ll kill you, you hear me?” Cricket shrilled, and in her arms little Morgan whimpered. “You’re messing with the wrong black woman.”

  Birdie bit her bottom lip. Her eyes blinked uncontrollably. But she didn’t say a word. Mama studied Birdie’s face.

  Sheriff Abe, who had known Birdie all her life, spoke. “You come on with me and Rick now,” he told Birdie. “We’ll get this thing settled properly.”

  “I’ll kill you stiff dead,” Cricket said, clutching Morgan so hard the baby started to cry again.

  Mama’s eyebrows shot up. “Take it easy,” she said to Cricket.

  “I’ll kill her if she lays another hand on my baby!”

>   “No harm has come to Morgan,” Mama pointed out. But she looked worried.

  “If she so much as looks at my Morgan again, I’ll kill her. I swear!”

  Sheriff Abe eased between Cricket and Birdie.

  “Now that you’ve got that beautiful child back, why don’t you take her home?” Mama suggested gently.

  Cricket looked down at Morgan and her face lit up. “Don’t you ever put your hands on my baby again,” she warned Birdie Smiley. “If you touch my Morgan again, your behind is mine and nobody is going to keep me from it!”

  We watehed Cricket sashay away, swearing loud enough for everybody inside and outside of the store to hear her. Abe and Rick waited until she was driving out of the parking lot before they led Birdie toward their patrol car.

  “Cricket isn’t the most modest girl,” Mama said to me, her eyes following Abe and Rick. “Actually, the girl is a bit on the wild side. I’ve spent more than a few hours trying to get her to tone down, think about her reputation in this town. I can’t say she’s paid much attention to what I’ve told her, though. Still, I know that she loves her baby. I’m convinced that she’d die for Morgan, if it ever came to that. No, it doesn’t surprise me, the way Cricket acted. But, Birdie—It just ain’t her nature to do something like stealing a baby from an automobile.”

  “Maybe Birdie’s crazy,” I said, looking down at my Famous Amos cookies and wondering how many calories were in the whole package. “She certainly acted like she was unbalanced.”

  Mama shook her head sadly. “I admit there must be something seriously wrong with Birdie. There’s no other reason I can think of for her to steal that baby in broad daylight and then bring her inside this store where a crowd of people would see them.”

  By now even the nosiest shoppers were moving on. Mama sighed. “You know, Simone, I’ve worked with both Birdie and her husband, Isaiah, doing volunteer work at the community center with our young people. I’ve never seen her so confused.”

  I shrugged. My mind wandered on to Cliff and the way he smiles like Richard Roundtree; the man drives me crazy. “We need to get home. I’m expecting Cliff to call,” I said, changing the subject from Birdie and children.

  Mama nodded as if she knew that my interest in the events that had just taken place had already waned.

  I looked down into our shopping cart. We still hadn’t picked up the pork roast or the chickens. “Let’s get this over with,” I told Mama, thinking of the wonderful meals she had promised me.

  CHAPTER

  TWO

  As she had promised, Mama did her thing. Our Sunday dinner was a deliciously signatured Candi Covington. After we’d eaten, Mama and I cleaned the kitchen. My father and Cliff sat in the family room drinking Heineken while Daddy told Cliff every detail of my childhood.

  I’m convinced that, to keep on my father’s good side, Cliff acted like he enjoyed these stories. Every time my father stopped talking, Cliff would pop a beer and ask him another question.

  By seven o’clock, my father seemed satisfied with Cliff’s attentiveness. (Besides that, all of the beer was gone.) Mama suggested that Daddy lie down for a while but, of course, he wouldn’t consider that. He said he had to make a trip to his buddy Coal’s house. Coal lived in the town of Darien, a fifteen-minute drive from Otis.

  Mama went to her room to, as she said, make a few phone calls. (I suspected to call Coal to tell him to keep an eye out for my father, although she’d never admit to it.)

  My parents had remodeled the back of their home the past spring. A wall had been torn out and double-hung floor-to-ceiling windows had been installed; the new look gave the kitchen and the adjoining family room the illusion that they were completely glass. Both rooms now opened into a backyard garden of herbaceous borders, fragrant roses, and gardenias. Azaleas thrived under the limbs of a big oak tree, and a new chain-link fence was bordered with bright annuals.

  Cliff and I sat outside in the garden. Daddy’s dog, Midnight, stretched out at our feet. I’d told Cliff that my visit to Otis would last a week because of Mama’s surgery. Cliff had news for me, too. He would be going to L.A. His stay would be a minimum of two weeks. His most vocal client, Mrs. Campbell, wanted him near while she inventoried one of the houses that were being sold as part of her divorce settlement.

  We sat and talked and watched the summer sun set over peaceful Otis until nine o’clock, when Cliff headed back to Atlanta.

  My parents’ bedroom had a freshness to it, like linen that had been washed in bleach and hung outside to dry. Sunlight from a skylight overhead streaked across the floor, illuminating a cherry TV/VCR armoire. It had glass knobs and a bottom pull-down door. Mama loved that armoire—she’d bought it for herself in celebration of obtaining her bachelor’s degree from the University of the State of New York Regents External Degree program.

  Their bed was a four-poster, cherry, like the armoire. The windows were draped in white Priscilla curtains with tiebacks. On the floor was a Persian rug, something that my father had gotten on the black market during one of his tours near the Persian Gulf.

  It was Tuesday morning, nine-thirty A.M. to be exact. Twenty-four hours had passed since Mama had her bunions removed. She lay in the four-poster bed, her feet propped up on a stack of large pillows. The doctor had told me to make sure her feet stayed elevated above her heart. Mama had a concerned expression on her face, like something was on her mind. I surmised it was because she was so helpless, something very rare.

  I’d cooked her breakfast, nothing as elaborate as she would have fixed for me had it been I who was incapacitated—whole wheat toast, jelly, coffee, and two scrambled eggs. I suspected the eggs were a little runny but I didn’t want to overcook them. Mama had chided me more than once for scrambling eggs too hard.

  Now she looked down at her plate and smiled. The glint in her eyes told me that she was wondering whether she could live through a week of my cooking. Still, she said in a voice that sounded genuinely grateful, “Thanks, honey.” I told her it was no problem and went to call my office.

  Minutes after I’d gotten off the telephone after touching base with Sidney’s secretary, Shirley, the phone rang. Back in Mama’s room, I answered it, thinking that maybe Shirley had forgotten to tell me something.

  “Candi?” a familiar voice on the other end asked.

  “No,” I answered. “This is Simone.”

  “Is Candi able to talk on the phone?” the voice asked.

  “Just a minute,” I said, putting the phone down and reaching for Mama’s tray. “Sheriff Abe wants to talk to you,” I told her.

  Mama nodded, then reached over and picked up the receiver. She said hello, but didn’t say another word for several minutes. A couple of times she nodded, as if to herself, but for the most part she held the phone to her ear, listening. Finally, she said good-bye, then hung the phone up. When she looked up at me, she shook her head. “Cricket Childs is dead!”

  “An accident?” I asked.

  There was an extreme sadness in my mother’s face. “She was murdered. Clarence Young, who used to run with Cricket about three years ago, found her in his Cherry Ridge apartment. He told Abe that he’d been out of town working for over a week. When he got back home early this morning, he found Cricket’s body sprawled out on his bed. She was stabbed to death.”

  “How terrible,” I gasped. Then I asked, “Where is her baby?”

  “I guess Morgan is with one of Cricket’s people,” Mama answered. “That poor little baby.”

  For the first time I noticed the sound of rain hitting the bedroom window. It pricked an urging in the bottom of my stomach, a distinct message from my bladder. “I’ve got to go to the bathroom,” I said.

  Mama nodded, her eyebrows raised resignedly as she reached for her breakfast tray.

  While I was in the bathroom, I thought about the first time I’d met Cricket Childs, at Yasmine’s party. She was a tall girl whose head strutted two sets of weave. A cluster of curls on top, just above the crown
, looked like a bowl of strawberries. Below the crown and two inches past her shoulders she’d had long straight hair that shone like it had been waxed. Her complexion was mocha and her green dress fit her body like a wet suit. Cricket had a good figure except for her narrow behind that stuck out like a wad of chewing gum. Still, she was very pretty.

  I’d seen Yasmine hand her a drink and the next time I noticed Cricket, she must have had a few whiskey sours in her because her voice rose above the crowd and four foul words spilled from her mouth like a torrent.

  The rest of the evening I either saw Cricket rubbing her behind up against any male she could get next to or telling raunchy jokes that she ended up admitting were personal experiences. When Cricket seemed to target Cliff as her rubbing board, I knew it was time for us to split. I developed a headache and convinced Cliff to take me home.

  Returning to Mama’s bedroom, I sat on the chair beside her bed. “You know, Mama,” I said, trying to repress the fact that I’d wanted to wipe Cricket out myself when she’d rubbed up against Cliff, “there … uh … might be a reason for somebody to kill Cricket. You know, it could have been that Clarence took Cricket out on a date, things got rough, and he lost it. From the things Cricket said at Yasmine’s party, she’s had her share of rough dates.”

  Mama grunted. “Abe is still talking to Clarence. I suspect he’ll get to the bottom of his story, see if he was out of town working like he said. You know, Simone, people saw the wild side of Cricket, but there was more to her than that.”

  I listened.

  “You remember me telling you that I was at the hospital when Cricket gave birth to Morgan? Cricket had asked the nurses to call me. Even though her sister Rose was with her, she wanted me by her side. When I got to her, she grabbed my hand and held it as if she was holding on for dear life. ‘I’m scared, Miss Candi,’ she told me. ‘Scared I’m going to die.’ The poor child was so helpless, I almost wished I could have had that baby for her.”