Big Jim slept a little later on Saturdays, but by nine he had seen Margarete out, had two cups of dark coffee with three spoons of sugar in each. Granma’am had told me that if I had too much sugar it would give me a tick, so I was sure to have only two sugars in my coffee, but now I drink it every day, and I didn’t used to.
Josephus would come by around eleven or eleven-thirty. I would be home by myself and by then would have put the baby down for her nap. I closed the door to Luke edward’s room so the noise wouldn’t travel in, and I would play Luke edward’s records and talk to Josephus about how it was at the plant that week, and how much money he had saved, when is the last time I saw Luke edward or David, or whether I was tired of taking care of Clara, and whether he wanted to eat what I had left over for lunch.
Josephus always asked me what I had done that day with the Missus Pearson work. That was my favorite part of his visit. I would take and show him from my books and notebooks all the knowledge I ran behind. Josephus let me teach him. If I had not had that to look forward to—a set of wondering, attentive eyes and ears—I might have started the long walk down home, back to where somebody would recognize me. And left the baby with a bottle in the crib.
After Clara woke up and I fed her again, I would wrap her up in her outdoor things while Josephus would haul the Cadillac stroller downstairs. Josephus and I would walk all around the ways he learned between where he lived across town and where we lived. He would help me push the stroller, and more and more he took me to walk near the big high school. On Saturdays, the school was closed, the air was cold, and the yard was full of boys practicing their exercises for the football games they played, and girls cheering, majorettes. J and I pushed the stroller all along the high fence.
MY DREAM CALLED Clara before she arrived. I usually dream like a spectator. Usually I dream about other people, and I watch what they do, like I’m sitting on the edge of a fence, and the people I’m watching are play-acting on the field. This time, I was really in the dream, and that’s how I know it had bearing on my real life.
Josephus and me was closer than we are by then. Or maybe I was just over his house playing like. I didn’t see no legal papers hanging up in the dream, and all country people have that legal paper hanging in a frame, if they got it.
I was loving shoes! I was picking them up all over the place we lived in and rubbing on them as if they each was alive and needing love. I was kind of sick of myself, doing all that. And I was only finding one shoe at the time. I would hold it, sit with it, rub on it, and then put it away, lay it down on the floor of the closet. After that I would find another and do the same again.
Other than the shoes, the place was clean as the kitchen at midnight, so that’s how I know that I’m in my own flat. Josephus was out working, though I won’t know ever what shoes he could of been wearing, many as I was picking up round the place.
Here’s the beat-all: Margarete come in. She walk right into the front room where I am holding a black shoe. Margarete looks direct at me, and I hold my breath! Margarete’s hair is gray-white, and thin as new onion. Her big stomach what was full with the baby is flat in the dream, gone. She smiles at me on that one side like she do, and asks me ain’t I glad she taught me how to love and take care of my children. What is she talking about, I’m thinking, these ain’t children, they shoes. I’m considering that her eyes getting limp as her hair. I looked down at the shoe, and sure as afternoon, it was a drooling baby child, a girl.
I jumped up and went abruptly to the bedroom closet to investigate. I dropped the shoe baby I held. There they were, a whole brood of drooling babies, lined up on the floor, cross from the bed. All of them girls. I had been putting them away—shoe baby girls—all afternoon. I counted: seventeen.
I rushed back to see about the one I had dropped. There, still in the front, was Margarete and the child. Both of them cooing and bald.
And that was the end of it.
Of course that dream was just what it seemed. Margarete’s new baby girl, Clara, come in the next two weeks. She changed the whole way I lived.
SO PLAIN A THING
MARGARETE SAID, “I’MA have the baby in the bed in your room.”
I was quiet, listening; the baby was here practically, Margarete was confirming it. Now, I had just moved into Luke’s room, sad that my brothers weren’t in the room they had had so long, and glad to be out of the public front of the house. Why did Margarete want to have the baby in there? Was she feeling like she wanted to be in the place Luke had left? Did she want to be near me, thinking this baby coming might take a long time? Well, should I just help her get in there? What’s on top of the beds? I wonder to myself. Oh, I better go clean the clothes off the other bed. “Margarete,” I say, “let me just clean the other bed off, it’s some clothes I folded on top.”
She is already lifting her heavy feet, getting off her bed and into her house shoes. “Let me go head now, keep this room clean for Jim,” she says.
Things fly through my mind like thrown hardballs. I am remembering Granma’am’s rhythm: “You be sure and he’p y’mother, now; be sure and he’p y’mother.” Obediently, I move toward her bed to walk Margarete to my room.
Margarete puts her arm around my shoulder, and leans. She smells like fertile ground. “Neesey, thank you for comin up to help me,” she says. You can hear her feet slide now. “I’m too old to be havin a baby,” she says. Slide, shuffle, say her house shoes in between. “You should be havin this baby, not me,” she says. I avoid the hardballs with my head.
BIG JIM HAD exercised some forethought, though, and he had borrowed a car from one of his buddies, so when it was time to go cross town for Miz Alma, he swore to me he would be back in a hurry, and I believed him. Big Jim told me when he left that I should start all the big pots of water to boiling, and make sure Margarete was OK. His nervousness hung in my head like a family portrait, in between my filling the pots up near to the top with water, and walking them to the four burners on the stove. I was thirteen years old, and had been dealing with pots for at least five of those years, hard. Still, I remarked how heavy it all was. As I hauled the full pots from the sink to the stove, the weight pulled at my inside, I noticed.
Margarete babbles her way through our wait, and her water, and the boiling pots of water in the kitchen. I turn the burners down, and cover them with lids, to keep the water hot, and just to have something to do.
“Neesey, come sit down here by the bed,” Margarete calls, not feebly but raspylike. I look again for the blue car while I think where to sit.
“OK, Margarete,” I call back, “let me go get a chair from the kitchen.” I go back to the kitchen and close up the instructions for the order of operations. I slide the closed book carefully to the very end of the table, in case the lady Big Jim brings needs to use the table space. But the book will be there when she comes, in case they don’t need me, and I can have the kitchen and try to understand what the instructions say. I pull the chair out from the table—the chair I have been sitting in. Before I take it into the bedroom, I decide to check the boiling water. I start with the cast-iron pot because I worry that the water will damage its season. I dumbly grab the pot handle with my fingers—and just like that, a scar.
I do go to sit by the bed with Margarete. I take a cold rag and ice to nurse my burn. Margarete babbles and embarrasses me. Of course, Big Jim has not yet returned because Margarete must say what she says. So I listen and do not repeat her babblings ever, and hope that she will be finished by the time he arrives, hope that he will come with the lady before I have to be responsible, hope that Margarete will not want to be closer to me because of what she tells me, if she remembers.
“You remember your daddy, Neesey?” Of course I remember my daddy. I tell her “of course,” in a soft voice with a clean f. “Your daddy was the best man,” she goes on. “He took me from the country like I was the first apple to fall from a tree he shook. Every gal down home wanted your father, Neesey. He was strong and fin
e and had been so many places. We came to Detroit together. I got so full of dreams between the time he asked me to marry him and the time when we left for Detroit, I gained weight.” She smiles, she looks caught between memory and now. “I wanted to come up here and try out as a singer. Me and Evelyn Ownes had that plan. Evelyn can actually sing a little better than me, but I had a higher voice so I could sing the lead parts. Made my singing a little easier to appreciate than Evelyn’s, I think, but Evelyn has the better voice. Do you know any of this, Neesey?” she asks me.
“Yes,” I answer being sure to close my teeth, “me and Lantene talked about you and Miss Evelyn down home.”
“Do Evelyn smoke?” Margarete asks me.
“Naw,” I say, “but she use snuff.”
“Snuff!” Margarete snorts. “Lord, we gettin old. Where do you think Jim is?” I don’t answer because I want to bawl, myself. “Well, see Evelyn’s voice probably still better than mine, mine has crumbled like a old wall behind these Chesterfields I been smoking. Your father loved to hear me sing. I sang to him all the time. I came up here, and found a job in a shop right away. Actually got a friend a Buddy’s who had a club to let me sing in there one night a week. Had a little following too. Men who worked the rails, all Buddy’s group of people, would bring their ladies in and stay and listen to me sing all night. And order enough pork chops and pigs feet to reassemble the hogs.” She laughs a little. And calls out, Lord, from the pain. “Your father wanted children, and I had them. I didn’t have no luck with the singing, but Lena told me that’s cause I was waiting for somebody to come in and get me like Buddy had. She said all the people came there was coming for dinner and cabaret, that discovery was beyond their means and their minds. I always liked that saying she made up, their means and their minds. She kept telling me to take myself to the door of somewhere where discovery meant something practical, but I just had children, and got good at croquignole. Men want children, Deneesey—it’s in them. Remember that. What our men think they passing on, I don’t know, but our men just like the rest of men—they like to have babies.”
MARGARETE MOVED BACK into her room with Big Jim soon as she could, and I rushed from home to school and back again while Clara came to life. I didn’t see Missus Pearson for any extra at all at first. Seem like I spent all my time cooking and washing, and toting Clara. I didn’t mind so much, but I was surprised by the hill of diapers always need attending—either washed, folded, taken off or put on the baby. Thank the Lord for Margarete’s wringer washer. I used it every other day to wash the twenty or thirty diapers that Clara either wet on, poo-pooed in, or that I slung across my shoulder for her to drool or spit up on. I would put them all in the tub and let the automatic machine shake out all Clara’s messiness, and then I would run one or two diapers through the wringer at a time. Margarete showed me how to be careful that my hands didn’t get stuck, so I would guide the white, bleached baby things through the wringer rollers and end up with white, flat, waterless diapers, clean and ready for the line. The clothesline Jim had strung up to go out the kitchen window, across the yard, to the roof of the shed was perfect. I would open up the window wide, and roll the line after I clipped the diapers to the line with clothespins. I got better and faster at getting all this done. Got so I could wash diapers in the morning, feed Clara, and then go on to school. This was the way it should be, so the diapers could dry in the glory of the sun.
Summer came, and then school was finished. After school was finished, I didn’t have nothing of my own to miss or to rush to.
PERIODICALLY, I WALK through the front room and look out the window down the street. I am looking for the blue car Big Jim borrowed to come back with the lady Miz Alma in it. I walk light because I don’t want to disturb Margarete. If she is handling this anything like me, she hears all my movements as if her ears are thumb-tacked by the narrow part to the floor. That is how I am listening to her in the bedroom. When she turns, and I am looking out the window down to the street in the front, I can hear the change in the direction of her breathing. I decide that it is the difference between breathing into the wall, or breathing out into the rest of the room, that I hear. I want to go in and help her, if there is something I can do. The blue car is not coming; it is a watched pot.
WHEN JIM TURNS his key in the knob the ice has melted from my burn, and I feel like I have been pressed flat into a big cardboard doll of a girl. I am folded, of course, in the chair. Jim rushes in to Margarete who I hope will not continue her stories. And I introduce myself and take the coat from a woman who says she is Alma Jones. She is as big as me and Margarete put together. Miz Alma Jones has her head tied with a big white cotton cloth, and her mouth is slack.
I am happy to see Miz Alma, as you might know, and I am happy to take her coat and hang it inside a closet because I’m sure we won’t be needing it for some time. When I come back, Miz Alma is in the kitchen and she has turned up the flames. She sees me favoring my hand and picks up my arm to look at the burnt fingers; they want to swell up, but I have been beating the swelling back with the cold of the ice. I do not intend to do any more with the pots. “You burnt y’self on dese here pots?” she asked me. She says it like “boint.”
“Yes,” I answer.
“You through wid dat rag?” she asks me. I have the rag I used with the ice in my hand.
“Yes,” I say, “but we got plenty rags.”
“I’ll take dis one, hit’s already used,” she says, and she takes the rag from me. She squirts snuff from her mouth into the rag, and turns and opens the window over the sink, and drops the rag out, down to the back yard. I reach under the sink and pull out a stack of rags I have washed and folded, and I follow Miz Alma into the room where Margarete is. Big Jim has propped Margarete up more than she was. “Forget dat burn,” Miz Alma Jones says on the way.
Miz Alma seemed a little light in the head. I didn’t know whether she was; I allowed that it was possible that she has things in her head that I don’t know nothing about yet. And so I could think she was light in the head and be wrong, easy. Big Jim went way cross town to get her, he must know her marks: I decide I should be listening to the things her talk held, light in the head or not.
Once Margarete is settled and Miz Alma is in charge, I go directly to my math. The book says: In the order of operations, multiplication is first. Division is second, addition is next, followed finally by subtraction. When equations contain more than one operation, as many equations in new math do, select operations and perform them in this order, unless otherwise instructed by parentheses.
CLARA’S MAMA HAD her right there in the bed in the room that me and Clara shared; Clara was born in the bed I sleep in now, that Luke edward had slept in before. Big Jim was excited. He wanted a girl, and he got one. He come clomping in the house and to the bedroom door in those filthy work boots of his. Filled the doorframe where Margarete’s labor had her screaming. After Clara was out and living, Margarete didn’t make much more noise.
Miz Alma had me go out and tell Big Jim the baby girl ain’t come yet and to get on away from that door. “Fact, tell Jim to git on out this house,” Miz Alma called from the valley between Margarete’s legs. “He kin come back in three hours.” First time I ever said anything to Big Jim about what he should do or where he should go.
Miss Alma stayed at our place a country day, which is from daylight to daylight again. She talked me half to death, just like Margarete had, but that was OK on account of I was real scared about whether I could of taken care of Mama by myself. I was so relieved when Miz Alma arrived. Miz Alma told me Mama ain’t need much taking care of, specially by me, on account of Mama had laid up with me just like she laid up with this here baby girl.
Dog, she knew right off! Miz Alma come right in Margarete’s birthing-room door talking about the baby girl what’s coming.
Round two in the morning, I guess, when sleepiness was threatening to make me look like a child again, I sat there half nodding half dreaming about school; Miz Al
ma had taken a break in her going on about the babies she had birthed in Biloxi. She had told me about her daughter Bereneice who had five children now. According to Miz Alma, Bereneice had made herself a nice piece of change washing clothes up here in Detroit. Only had to leave her house once a week or twice a week in the summers and near holidays. Now some of Bereneice’s girls was getting to be nine and ten and so was getting old enough to help with the washing. Miz Alma was real proud of Bereneice, say she got a good machine and twelve rope lines outside in the yard. She say that they been saving together all the years since her son Mack died. Soon, she told me, her and Bereneice gone buy the family a home up here.
I ASKED MIZ Alma what happened to Mack. First she told me every question wasn’t the right question for a young lady my age to be asking. I dropped my head and she didn’t speak again for some time. Fact, I had given up on finding out what happened to him and was thinking bout something else totally when she said, “Po chile, dis heah city took ’im quick.”
I suppose if Miz Alma hadn’t of just now told me to mind my place, I’d of spoke right up saying, “Whatchu mean, took him?”
Or if it had been Lantene listening, instead of me, she might have asked, “Exackly what de city do tuh him, Miz Alma?” I sure did miss Lantene and how good she was with nosiness: I am clumsy with my questions and slow to know what’s good to find out. Miz Alma went on on her own after a time.
“Be glad y’mama havin a girl baby. Ain’t nothin harder dan bein mama to a son, paticuly a son whas good at somethin.” Miz Alma sat right there in that hall chair and explained how the first thing went wrong was when the boy start to drinking corn liquor like God was taking corn. “An I mean takin it all tomorra,” she went on.
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