Good Negress

by Verdelle, A. J.

  The walk from our flat to my school building was my time to examine my mind about things. I raked over my mind plenty, most every day. Lord knows life been kind as grace to me, allowing me to come up from down home and go to school all these months, learning about geography and maps, and math and English, and reading some poetry out loud. Here I am concentrating on proper English, and if I was still down outside Richmond, I never would of had a chance to learn it. And Missus Pearson, she such a fine teacher. She start to teach us the important things soon as she get in the classroom. Not like with Missus James, all us country kids sitting in the back and wishing half the time we was back home.

  Missus Pearson taught me to diagram sentences. Put the subject and predicate on a straight line to themselves. Slant other words underneath the line of the word it modifies. In language, one thing precedes and another follows. That’s what Miss Pearson said. Even though precedes seems like predicate to me, Miss Pearson say it is the subject that precedes and the predicate follows. When she said something that subject and predicate I could understand, I would reach out my hand, try to snatch it, and try to paste it correctly in my composition book. Late at night, while I waited for Big Jim and Margarete to come in, I would take apart the nouns and adjectives, verbs and adverbs, and get straight the words that had capital letters. By the end of all our time together, she had taught me appositives, and subordinate clauses, verbs of action and of being. She amazed me what she knew and saw in things.

  I diagrammed the sentences she shot at me aloud. I wrote down the things I remembered that she said, and I would put them on their grammar lines. Do your homework. Purse your lips. Repeat what I say, Denise. Try harder.

  The subject lines were mostly blank, and when I asked Missus Pearson about it, she was pleased to grinning by my question. She talked forty minutes about implied subjects and imperatives.

  At home in our apartment, I wrote and wrote. At our kitchen table, or hunched over the coffee table, sometimes while I rocked Clara’s bassinette swing. I looked up words in the dictionary, wrote their spellings and definitions ten times. Like formula, dismissed, perturbed, precipitation, barometer, proprietor. Used my dictionary for spelling and for meaning. I might put the baby to sleep, and then spread all my things out on the single bed I slept in in the room with the sleeping child. Or I might put the baby down and go back into the kitchen where I could smell that the kidney beans and neckbones were still cooking, about done, needing salt, or just about to burn. Me and Granma’am never ate as much neckbones as Margarete and Big Jim, Luke edward and David seem to. But I try to keep up with the tastes they have for things.

  I FILLED A composition book a month studying on my own. The thick pages with my handwriting gave me something to show to myself for my days.

  Missus Pearson said that it was my not knowing the English language that cut me off from a bigger world. But it was Margarete’s baby that kept me in the house, that cut me off from outdoors, even. Well, I figured if I could feed and wash the baby, douse her with powder and lay her down, clean and sweet, then I could look up all the words I didn’t know and write them down in my school notebooks and try to reach to somewhere.

  I FIND OTHER things to do besides cook, clean, buy meat, wash bottles, and diapers. I practiced how to write answers to questions. Every time I went to school, I took in extra I had done.

  At the end of the school days, I said, “Good afternoon,” to Missus Pearson longingly. On the days I got my extra back, I felt better. The extra would be marked across the top: Look up Charleston (atlas). Look up Corsica (encyclopedia). Who is Valentine Kinsey? (your memory). Who is Lawrence and what about those brooms he made? How many times have you been to Richmond Center, and what did you do each time you went? And the bottom: Good. Very Good. Six, seven, eight, two wrong verbs. Correct and bring back. We got to the place where she stopped circling the wrong verbs for me. Just a note of how many, and I had to find my own mistakes.

  SOME DAYS I walk with the carriage to meet Missus Pearson after she has finished the after-school work with other students but me. After me and J left, she stopped the after school at four when all the kids said they had to leave. I roll the buggy and she carries her papers and we go back to the flat where she lives. That’s one thing Clara did for me, made Missus Pearson more than my teacher, also a kind of friend, for a time.

  When there’s time she invites me in, I mean, us in. I have made tea on her stove. Her stove is a small and friendly fixture in her kitchen, which is small too. Clara sleeps like the little exhausted baby she is; she sleeps in her stroller like it’s a good bed. Missus Pearson’s flat is quiet like a blanket that surrounds it. Missus Pearson lets me help her with whatever it is she has to do. The first summer I was out of school, I cut up two hundred and twelve paper bags and covered fifteen crates of school books for Missus Pearson’s next year. The bag paper dried my hands out so bad. And it took me days because when Clara would wake up and start to bawl, Missus Pearson would not let me walk her up and down and shake her. Instead, Missus Pearson told me, the first time I tried to quiet Clara in her flat, that when Clara needed to play or cry or romp and grow, I should take her home and let her do it. She prefers children who can speak English and who are old enough for discipline, she said. I think I heard some amusement in her voice. I know I always hoped I did. Anyway, she left whatever I was doing—this time, the books, covered and uncovered—for me to finish the project on my own. Wasn’t that nice?

  She also gave me lots of things to write about, insisted I write about raising the baby. She read every page of my composition books, and marked them up with red ink. Never said a word about what I wrote:

  Margarete does not seem interested in the baby. Clara threw up on my new sweater today. Big Jim wakes Clara up too late in the night. Clara doesn’t seem to be full of Margarete’s anger, not like Big Jim about Luke edward, not like I worried she would be, what with them arguing and the baby living in her belly. I am glad. Clara loves Luke edward like milk. Clara and me are the same in that way.

  Missus Pearson was trying to cheer me up by letting me visit her apartment, and she tried to continue to teach me by letting me sit in the back of her class whenever I could come. Going to her house, I couldn’t help but think: what must I look like, young, and with that carriage. I must look fast, and ruint too. Beyond myself. People must wonder where is my spoiler. They must think he gone.

  APPLIANCES

  SOLDIERED

  ALL AROUND

  IT WAS JUST after Clara was born that the rumble between Big Jim and Margarete ran out from their bedroom into the rest of the flat. I knew I had been hearing it in the night. It was like all the urgent, pressed exchanges that warned of surrounding disaster, that caused us women responsible to perk to the alarm, that caused us to reach under the bed to the money case and take out a few bills so carefully stored.

  This is what time the train will be here, son.

  Here is the money for your fare.

  Do you have your bag?

  Did you call on your mother?

  Don’t talk to anybody, and here is lunch in case you get hungry.

  Do not get out of your seat until you get there and go straight to Harold Grayson.

  If you don’t drink anything you won’t have to pee.

  Luke edward, pay attention to what I say now.

  In the light of day, it was nothing so secret, so romantic, so solved. It was a naked argument with a mute, a bad moment wanting to continue, just to hear itself be nasty. It was not what I fantasized, not what I might think an urgent pressed exchange would be. Margarete and Big Jim had an issue and it was Luke edward. And they wanted to see who it was could win, with only what-they-were-willing-to-admit as weapons.

  The war showed so sadly on Margarete’s face. She was very upset about Big Jim’s continuing disapproval of her son. Her first line of fire was Luke edward’s well being. “Jim, he ain’t stealin, he ain’t botherin nobody; I’m not about to put him out so he’ll have to do
all that.”

  Big Jim was not moved. “If you ain’t gone put him out, Margreet, I will. You do not have to worry about that. Why should he be here, living carefree as a damn baby?” A pause breathes while Big Jim waits for Margarete to join his thinking; he doesn’t wait long. “You better teach that boy somethin before he dies dumb as sin.”

  Big Jim just had no tolerance for Luke edward, mostly because Luke edward did too much nothing for Big Jim’s taste. Funny to see a man so devoted to Clara, and so venomous like he was about his wife’s other child.

  Every evening Big Jim asked questions about Clara. Do she follow with her eyes? What she eat today? How much she drink? How long she been sleep? When did she start making that little grunt sound? Is she trying to make words? He looked down into the well of Clara’s crib from his height. His standing at the crib left Margarete alone, to oil her skin and contemplate Luke. Big Jim was gently encouraging Margarete to lose the weight she had gained, but after he started in on Luke edward, she started to suspect everything he had to say. She accused him of thinking she was too fat, and he told her that she knew damn well he would tell her what he was thinking. And that what he was thinking she did not want to deal with. He was right about that, and Margarete didn’t comment on Luke edward unless the whirring fight had her backed against a wall. Then she might say, No, Jim, I do not agree.

  The two of them picked up their regular schedule over time: a week’s work and a weekend’s hard parties. Even when they stayed out late, Big Jim came in anyway to lean over Clara’s crib side and look. Clara learned the smell of liquor from the crib side. Got to the point where I would stay up late on weekends, wait up, and write or read. So I wouldn’t be startled by him, late, and me asleep. So I could watch and make sure he only breathed on the baby, and that the liquor didn’t take anything else away.

  Their argument continued. Came through the walls like a current in disrepair. At night, they whispered to each other, they jabbed the air with quiet blades. Margarete’s voice low and tugging at the wires. Big Jim’s voice solid, a machine at the end.

  They did have all the gadgets. A nice shiny toaster that I used most every day, and a cake beater I used once a week. Margarete got Big Jim an electric shaver, black with a gold razor net on top. I have seen Luke edward using it too, but I don’t think Big Jim knew about this. Margarete has brought a hair dryer from the shop, which you put over your wet head like a big hat. I like for my hair to dry in the braids, but sometimes Margarete insists, so I take the heat to satisfy her.

  Like an appliance that has finished with its new phase and has settled into the hard work of repetition, the argument I hear rumbles in the wallboards. I can’t tell top or bottom of the sounds. I wonder what they say to each other, so late in the night, while I am copying my extra onto a neat sheet of paper. Or rocking Clara to sleep: Alpha beta gamma delta epsilon zeta eta theta iota kappa lambda mu nu xi omicron pi rho sigma tau upsilon phi chi psi omega. It is a singsong alphabet Gloria Pearson taught me from the sorority she belong to. She said she wants it to remind me of how much there is to learn in the world. Clara likes it—it puts her to sleep right off. Missus Pearson told me if I want to join her sorority I probably can when I get more education, since the rules about color have been relaxed.

  The rumble decided that the house is just too small.

  It is late in the night again, and the rules and Greek alphabet are dancing outside my head—a future I might have. Big Jim, the fan, is whirring discontent, and Margarete, a thin and fraying cord, is draped across the floor, plugged in.

  Luke edward is Margarete’s favorite child and man. They act more like sister and brother sometimes than mother and son. They act more like husband and wife sometimes than mother and son. They are close in temperature, in humor, in separateness from me and David and Big Jim. They both sing. Luke in the front room, in front of the RCA, and Margarete in the bathroom or in the hallway coming up the steps. And too, they think many things are funny. I mean I’m not serious and sad, like David, but time I figure out what it is Luke and Margarete are laughing at, they have finished laughing and gone on to something new. I ask so many questions, trying to join the fun, that their mouths slack down in disappointment or exhaustion at the time it takes me to get with things. On occasion, when they want to, they can turn to each other and reignite. Or they get up and walk out, and whoop again in transit: Luke doubled over, Margarete wiping tears. Both glad to have my absent face behind them.

  Margarete was nice enough to me. She was talkative and involved (for her) from the time she met me at the foot of the stairs. She was apologetic about the cot in the front room and interested when I told her that the knife was dull. She wouldn’t let me go downstairs to sharpen it on the curb; said it was too late and that these the kind of knives she always used.

  Granma’am wanted no parts a coddling Luke edward. She told Margarete that the child needed to be stood over until he could stand by himself. She told Luke more than several times he was spoilt and warn’t no place for a spoilt Negro man in no world like this one. She told him that she didn’t mind his earnin his little piece a change and buyin hisself a few things now and then, but he needed to learn to use his money to bake his bread first. She declared he didn’t have the first mind for priorities and look like he just didn’t care.

  Margarete permitted him what she never permitted me. And what was the difference between us? Lots was different, as you can see by the end. I stayed inside the fence and inside the rules. Somehow that bought me some small freedoms. He was given all the freedoms and ended up caged. Even I saw it coming. I don’t yet understand the paradox of it myself.

  I don’t think Margarete is going to win against Big Jim. Not as tired as she is.

  BARBARA JEAN, MISS Macie’s oldest daughter, came to take care of Granma’am after the stroke. Barbara Jean was so religious she seemed retarded. She made no decisions by reason, only by rote, having memorized what they told her God has said. She nods her head to my wail about Luke edward, and from inside the church of the upliftment doctrine, she says, “Don’t you worry y’self none bout Luke, chile, the Master says the males shall be the Lord’s.” She is slow with her pronouncement, and she looks at me as if to see if I accept. Without a sign of recognition from me, she lapses back into eternal upliftment, and I continue to complain about my brother, who may disappear while we all argue. I cannot face no longer seeing who I know him to be.

  My instructions were the bedrock. And they did not change in all my years down home. Fact, they were under my skin so, I had to stare straight through my berry brown to try to dig them up again. I just wanted to know what lectures propelled me. Learn verses from the Bible and say them over meals. Sweep the house from front to back every other day, and sweep the room from ceiling to floor if you walk through a web. Wash all windows and walls in spring. Honor your grandmother and respect your elders, period. Go to sleep giving thanks to the Lord. Rise with humility, anticipating service. Do your schoolwork, read when asked—letters, news, instructions that came with packages. Be a good child, be a good daughter, never ever lie or steal. Come home before dark, don’t track dirt in the house. And always, always close the gate.

  EVERYBODY IN DETROIT had their own money. Brenda Greenfield got allowance from her grandmother and aunt, and all during the week she walked into Peckway’s before or after school, and bought what sweet or salty sour things she liked. One day she asked me what I liked. I had been in Peckway’s with her by then enough to know the full layout of the store. She had given me a ball of gum, as she did most every day, and blowing the bubbles so big like she taught me had made me daring. I pointed my arm high up over the cash box where the boy who might have been Mr. Peckway’s son was standing, hardly waiting to take money from some more little Negro children. He did not follow my finger, pointing. To him, we were nuisances with dimes.

  ONCE UPON A time there were two brown and lovely dolls. Their appeal was their dark skin and real human hair. The dark dolls had no
t been seen in stores before. On the shelves of the market, they were the cutest things. Many women who shopped with or for whiteladies and who themselves had dark daughters, remarked over the two of those babies high up there. Because they were brown—different than most dolls—and because they had moveable hair, the dolls were more expensive than any toys should be. So, they lingered on the shelves and had only each other for company.

  One doll, Nickel, was rotund and loved bubble gum. She was the one who discovered doll language. Sitting there one day, after yet another wonderful, doting grandmother walked sadly away, Nickel said to the other doll, Dime, “Hey, can you hear me?”

  Dime was confused. She heard, just like she heard everything else, but Nickel had never spoken before. Should she answer? Could she answer?

  “I hear you,” Dime said. She almost fell from the shelf, chortling, exuberant to know her mouth could work.

  They commented on all the women who walked by. The few men who came got remarks too. They learned from each other the places they had been; who put them together, who invented them, how rare they were: two chocolate doll babies with real human hair. Neither could figure how they got to Detroit or to the cold top metal shelf in the toy store. They discussed why it was that they cost so much, why it was they had to linger there. This conversation caused days of a lull in their talk. They were stumped.

  Finally, it was taller, thinner Dime who resumed the conversation. “Nickel, if I’m a Dime, why are you bigger than me?”

  Nickel answered, “I’m not bigger, you’re taller.”

  Dime said, “Taller is not bigger, you’re rounder, you’re stouter. That’s better; you’ll get bought first.”

  Nickel thought quietly, another lull of days. “I don’t know if either one of us will get bought. Or when. But I guess it is nice to be round. I guess that’s what I get, because I am worth less.”