Good Negress

by Verdelle, A. J.

  Would have been nice if they could have kept Clara out of it, but when I caught my ride back down to Hampton and to school, I had to leave Clara morose and in the middle. Broke my heart to see her like that, and then again to go.

  MARGARETE AND CLARA and Christine and I went to the courthouse. I had not been in one since David married, and then before that when Granma’am and I had traveled to Richmond, taking the children from our outside Richmond school to see government. Here we were, Luke edward’s team of women. Except Christine had Jordan in her arms. He wasn’t walking yet.

  On our way, Margarete insisted we stop for lunch first. She says we have left in plenty of time, that she planned this, that we should sit down and calm our nerves before we go. She is smoking.

  Christine says it’s a good idea; she says if she gives Jordan a bottle now, he’ll be sleep.

  We stop at Dot & Etta’s. Margarete gets shrimp and she has her fork in her hand. Christine gets a crabcake sandwich, and she holds Jordan’s bottle with one hand, a french fry in the other. I become the mother. “Clara, will you bless our food?” I say, and I put my hands together. Clara puts her hands together and she rests her thumbs on her collarbone. I bow my head. “God is gracious,” she says, “God is good. And we thank Him for our food. By His hands we all are fed. Give us, Lord, our daily bread. And God, please bless Uncle Luke,” she said.

  In the middle of the meal, Margarete says to nobody in particular, “Don’t y’all worry about my child. God gives the mother the last word.”

  I say nothing. I stare into the mist of her pronouncement.

  MARGARETE TOLD THE judge some long story. I was stone-faced. Furious. Concentrating on my courses in my head. I saw other boys we knew, waiting for their names to be called. It was a roster of a kind. Anthony Lawrence Junior Blake John Dwight Midwood Cyrus Luke edward Palms. Now this was before they were guilty or innocent. This was when they just went up and were verified. Every five minutes they were called.

  My lips have tightened into a straight line.

  I stood there in one of my best skirts and blouses. Margarete had said to dress up. I thought about the first time I had met Christine. I had been convinced, new arriving, that Luke edward was seeing Miss Tip. She had to be a bad influence on him, in my mind. I had been surprised and pleased about Christine.

  Now what good had she done him? With her sweater unbuttoned and that child so right away.

  “I WANT YOU to meet my girlfriend Christine,” Luke edward says; he is walking me to school.

  “Who is she?” I ask. “She wasn’t over to the house.”

  “She’s my girlfriend,” he repeats.

  I wonder if I should say I thought Miss Tip was your girlfriend, but then I see the city block of school building. “Is she pretty?” I ask him, just to keep the conversation going. I get inside my nervousness about this day ahead.

  “I think so,” Luke edward answers.

  “She dark?” I go on.

  “Nope,” he answers.

  LUKE HAD TAKEN me to hang around with him; he thought it would be better for me than being in the house cleaning and cooking all the time like a maid, he had said. I tried my first cigarette at his friend’s card party. And Christine, the first time she saw me, said she would adopt me as a little sister. She unbuttoned the top two buttons of my sweater. She told me I shouldn’t be so tight-stitched. I was uncomfortable for her to open my clothes like that, but then I was distracted by the boys competing for my attention. Luke edward kept saying Keep it distant to the boys.

  I only stayed a couple of hours because while I practiced on a third Lucky Strike, I choked so loud it stopped the party. I could not calm down after. Luke edward walked me home, and left me there with my scraped and burning throat.

  MARGARETE TRIED TO talk the judgers into believing that Luke edward was a good boy. I don’t think they believed her. Christine cried onto Jordan’s crocheted baby sweater. I don’t think they believed her either. I say nothing. Everything in my head takes up all the space of sound. It’s crazy-making. My god Luke edward, my studious man of the lamp, Lena’s darling, where will we have to leave you, fallen? Lord, I was in a mood. I tried to calm my nerves and talk to Clara. I asked her about school, second grade, one of my favorite subjects. She was irritable. I told her all about Hampton Institute. Some of what I said I had written to her in letters, and she whined. She told me she already knew these things. Her eyes were glassy with disappointment. It was just exhausting, the wait.

  LUKE ONCE SAID the people in Patuskie ain’t no different than tomato worms. It was near the end of one summer, and it was cool that night. Luke edward was prone to up and say the most critical things. Me and Granma’am both suck in our breath. I’m wondering where Luke edward will go with this; the room quiets around his remark. Granma’am leans over a pail in the sink, cleaning dirt off collards, and she doesn’t turn around, which is good. Luke edward sits at the wiped-off kitchen table with me. He is picking his teeth with a twig.

  “How you mean, the people like tomato worms, Luke edward?” I ask. I don’t really want to know. I am that way about some things Luke edward talks about. It is because I think he says some things just to get people’s back up. But I know Granma’am will want to know about this. She is who Luke edward is talking to, anyway. Granma’am says you have to know what’s in the children’s mind. I see expectation rising in her back. And so, again, I ask: “How you mean, the people like tomato worms, Luke edward?”

  “People trying to work these raggedy farms like worms be borin through tomatoes,” Luke edward says. “Stick their tongues down in the dirt and eat whatever’s down there. Act like it’s good, like they thankful.”

  Luke edward is really being clever. “Most people wanna leave here, anyway,” he says.

  “Most a the people like who?” Granma’am says from far away where she stands at the pail. The collards pile up. Clean green leaves in a stack for our dinner. The stems on the waste side, whisked in one swipe. I decide that it is disappointment rising in her back. Or maybe it is anger that I see. Luke is preoccupied with his teeth. Plus, he is turned the wrong way in his chair.

  I already have three ham hocks boiled, and I get up from the table to lift the lid and look. Ham hocks do not need to be checked on ever, especially before the vegetables go in, but I am trying not to see what’s in Granma’am’s face, when or if she turns to look at Luke. Rather smell the pork steam. I can see Granma’am standing bent over the sink, out the side of my eye. She wears all her history across her shoulders, like two buckets on a broad stick kept for carrying. Full buckets. Maybe full with milk or with water for boiling clothes. Maybe full with wood chips from the torn-down house her father built. Maybe full of other salvage from her past.

  “Lantene wants to leave,” he says.

  Dog. Lantene is my best friend, and I wish Luke would not bring her up. Luke edward does not hesitate to involve me in his disagreements, and I really do not like it. He goes on to name Price Green and his girl, and Nathan and Jacob, and Ethel Moore and her sister, Leroy Davis and his cousin, and all the Macie Fleming kids.

  Granma’am finishes cleaning the collards before she talks again. About the same time, Luke finishes with his teeth. “You say you, Luke edward? I didn’t hear you say, Luke edward wants to leave.”

  “I don’t live here,” Luke corrects her. I am aghast. “Plus, I’m going home next week,” he says.

  Granma’am has taken her knife: she chops up about half the tough, pale-green stems and she shreds the collard leaves. The minced collard stems will flavor the pot liquor, while I wonder where is David. Must be out running in the woods.

  MARGARETE FINALLY GOT tired of Granma’am’s foretelling, and she got tired of Luke’s bald stares. She said to Luke edward, “Dog on it, sixteen is old, young man. Too old for me to be spendin my little piece a money tryina give you fresh air in the hot summer. Why can’t you open your mouth and talk? Why would you cause Mama such embarrassment? When I was your age I damn
near had David, so you better believe I was grown and actin responsible. If you big enough to act ugly, then you must be big enough to figure out what to do with yourself all summer. I don’t know why you can’t be down home and act like you got some sense. Lord,” she says, walking out the room, “Mr. Watkins done had that store and been selling Mama goods fifty years. And here you come. This bad-ass boy of mine.”

  Finally, it doesn’t matter, how Granma’am wants to hack at Luke. Or how Margarete tries to be mean. Like I said, the boys stopped coming. So Granma’am’s hand in them was done. And Margarete’s mean attitude for Luke edward had about ten minutes of life in it, and that’s all.

  I THOUGHT MR. Jenkins was just a light Negro. He had the other store, right at the edge of the colored section of town. His store had more canned and packaged things than the Watkinses’, so some people preferred Mr. Jenkins’s store for that reason. The cans and packages cost more money and so he let folks run bigger bills. Granma’am did not allow me to shop with Mr. Jenkins. We went to the Watkinses, and that was that.

  Turns out, Mr. Jenkins is not a light Negro but a whiteman passing for colored. Whoever heard such a thing! Lantene told me all about it, and if I called her a liar, and I probably did, I had to take it back.

  “Granma’am! Lantene says Mr. Jenkins a whiteman.”

  Silence.

  “Granma’am? Mr. Jenkins white?”

  “Yes.”

  “What?!”

  Silence.

  “Well, what’s he doin married to Miz Irene?” Miz Irene Jenkins was as colored as me and wore her head tied up.

  “They married, and been married since before you was thought of.”

  “Granma’am.”

  Silence.

  “And, Neesey, I mean what I say. You stay way from the Jenkinses. If you need to get somethin, you go to the Watkinses, you hear me?”

  “Yes.”

  Lantene filled me in. Told me Miz Irene was faster than everybody. Including my mama and hers. Said Miz Irene had planned her husband-hunt, hard. She talked all the time about her intention to go to somewhere she could find herself a light-skinned husband. White be even better. Lantene said her mama said that after Margarete left with Buddy Palms wasn’t nobody left for none of the girls. Not even to hope on. Said her mama and Miz Irene thought they would never get nowhere else but where they were then.

  Well, Mr. Jenkins spent so much time on the colored edge of town. And their somewhere else was too imprecise. So Miz Irene put on her best dress on a dare and went up to Mr. Jenkins. Told him she give him anything he want for all his life if he would marry her. Lantene’s mama say he laughed. Said Irene knew right then she had him. Everybody know whitepeople laugh from nervousness, not just cause they think things is funny. Said it wasn’t nothing funny bout her proposal, so if he was nervous, that mean it hit on something somewhere. She talked to him through some liquor that night, and told him try it out for a month. Keep it secret. At the end of the month, if he had one complaint, they would be finished. She would go back to her colored life, and he to his white.

  They been married. Been married.

  “What’s his first name?” I asked Lantene. She went and asked her mother.

  “My mama don’t know,” she reported back to me.

  EVERYBODY DOWN HOME knew my mother and all her stories. When she planned to visit, they wanted to know when she would arrive, exactly, and would one or both the boys come with her this time. When she visited, they waved and grinned and wanted to talk about how the City was treating her, and wanted to know what new things she had brought for Miz Dambridge. After she left, they wanted to talk to me about how wonderful things seemed to be for my mother, and how much I had to look forward to.

  At the same time that all this present talk happened, history was reviewed in detail. If I didn’t know the ways I was the same as or different from Margarete Dambridge Palms Starks at any age, there was somebody round Patuskie to tell me. It was repetition that lodged my mother in my backbone. I grew tall around her lore. But underneath how I walked there was drilling. It was as simple and as straight as that. Legend made her out like sky to me. I reached for her heights. But how we were and who we were was altogether different. We were less like two dream girls and more like fry cooks, flipping meat. Testy with each other in such a small, hot space. Mad and serving food.

  MARGARETE SAT AT the kitchen table rubbing her hairdresser’s fingers across the pain in her head. “Neesey,” she said, hysteria warbling like a caught bird, “guess we better get on over to Christine’s and warn Luke the owner been by.” We, I consider, as I watch Margarete’s tired fingers run the grooves in her forehead, and as I consider the distance between the old shirt of David’s I had slept in and the clothes I would need to go out. “It’s a good thing you here,” she trails.

  “What you want me to do, Margarete?” I asked. She lifted her head. We two are alone in the kitchen. Four dark elbows on the flecked kitchen table. Of course she wants to snap at me. And she does: “I want you to get some clothes on and go warn your brother, Neesey.” I watch the bitters fly out of the red flush tunnel of her mouth. I wonder if I am woman as she is. My hair has been cut, and is rolled to style. Whether or not I show it, I know how disappointment turns the lips down. I am as shaken up and worried as all us women who attend. Doesn’t this make me grown?

  She does not have to repeat herself. The reflex to obey says I am still a child. The child me trails the woman me. Like a bride’s lacy net, it is near weightless and drags prettily on the floor. Absently, I pull the rollers from my flip and walk toward Luke edward’s closet. My clothes take up so little of the leering space.

  I smell his pomade and cologne seeping from the wood. I come quickly to my senses. I forget about Margarete and start to worry like a bomb about Luke.

  I scrape the hangers across the naked rod. Looking for my blue-checked skirt. I pull out an ironed white blouse, and I feel silly buttoning the long sleeves. Who has all this time? This, this is emergency.

  The owner will find him. The owner might take him somewhere, from us. Move, Neesey. I scold my ownself now.

  I lunge for my shoes underneath Clara’s bed where I put them when I visit, as a prayer. Of course, I knock her awake in the haste I manufacture. She starts and turns a few times. Then she jerks up. She has always been the kind of child for whom the mornings are a misery. She has that part of Luke edward in her. I lie, “It’s OK, sweetie, sorry I shook you.” I leave her for Margarete to fetch.

  “AIN’T YOU GONE yet, girl?” His mother worries. It is not a question she asks. It is not one last admonishment to get me out the door. His mother yowls. Or howls at least. She is a yelping soul in the doorway, watching me try to dress. I pass her and go to grab my coat, from a hook in the front hall.

  Clara wants to know Mama what’s the matter.

  “Tell Luke exactly what happened,” Margarete impresses. She walks over to where I hold the door open, listening to what she says. She sticks her hand into my coat pocket and puts her dwindling few dollars there. My pockets are shallow, so I put my hand over her money. I go out the door and do not look back. Why should I look back? I know all the nicks in that door. I made most of them with the stroller, bringing the baby in for dinner.

  Margarete has pushed the door shut behind me, and inside, Margarete talks to Clara who is tired and will not be becalmed. Margarete is slow to turn back into the flat because she knows just like I do the look on Big Jim’s face, all of us in turmoil over Luke edward, and so early in the morning.

  I rush forward. It is a fifteen-minute walk to where Christine and Luke edward live.

  ONLY EARLY BIRDS are up. Sanitation workers, maids and us. And I am cold, as usual.

  I catch myself wondering if J is up and gone to work yet. Be so nice for him to walk me, so I don’t have to think about where to go. Be so nice for him to help me through this mess, so I don’t have to try to take care of things plus summon up sense of my own. But he is not with me, a
nd in my disappointment and my embarrassment to catch myself thinking about his company, I rush him out of my mind by checking that the dollar bills are still crumpled in my pocket. It’s time to start looking for that big brick house on the corner where I need to make a right.

  I HAD PUT my own money pouch in the bottom of my drawers. I hadn’t wanted Margarete to know about the money I had. I sneak behind a hedge and take the pouch out. I put it in my pocket with Margarete’s money. I put my hand over all of it since, like I said, my pockets are shallow.

  I wonder should I call David for his strongbox money? No, I decide. First I will go to Luke edward. He is out here vulnerable, and if I don’t get to him fast enough, I will be blamed.

  HOW LONG WILL Luke edward continue to cause all this confusion? No doubt he is over there half-drunk or half-sleep, dancing, playing cards or doing who knows what with Christine and their friends. Their apartment is a flophouse, and Luke edward is King Flop.

  The brick house should be coming soon. I shouldn’t act like Luke edward ain’t no good; it just isn’t so. You had to know him when he was young to know what I mean.

  When the Owner Man came to our door, we had all headed toward it in our hazy phases of sleep. We all recognized the knock, it belonged to Luke edward. The question was, who knocked? Was it him, with his long, suggestive fingers? And what long story would he tell? He hardly came by anymore since Jim had taken his key away. Or was it someone else, about him? Someone with shorter less beautiful hands. Would they say he was dead, or just in trouble? What kind of grief was at the door?

  The Owner Man says one of the other boys knows where Luke stays with his girlfriend. Has the Owner Man gone to wake up the other boy? The other boy is probably a man, like Luke edward. The Owner doesn’t believe the other man did anything, so he probably won’t go wake up his family like he did us. It may be that I will get to Luke edward first.