Tumbling

by Diane McKinney-Whetstone

  When she spoke again, she said, “Guess we gonna have to turn her over to the authorities come daybreak.”

  “Guess we will,” he agreed. “Sure can’t keep her. That could get us both locked up.” His words felt like lead coming out. He was hoping Noon would say, “We not hardly turning this chile over. No, no, no.”

  TWO

  Daybreak came. The blues went from navy to royal to light with just a speck of pink. Then came the yellow spilling into Noon and Herbie’s bedroom. Noon was wide-awake, had been for the past hour. Herbie was snoring, and the baby was between them, fast asleep, looking like butter the way the sunlight was stroking her. The bed was warm. So warm that Noon didn’t jump right up when the Saturday morning church bells rang. And when she did get up, it was only because the baby needed feeding. Once that was done, she snuggled back in between the stiff muslin sheets topped with the patchwork quilt that was one-quarter wool. She moved the baby in closer to her body and thought that even though this was the beginning of April, they might need to buy yet one more bin of coal, especially if there was to be a baby in the house. She reminded herself then that they would still have to get in touch with the proper authorities who handled such things like abandoned children. She knew how they would have handled it back home. They would have taken the child to the mouth of the river and dipped her in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Ghost and claimed her as their own. No questions about it, none at all. But here in Philadelphia the laws were more complicated. The mother might even come back for the child. City people were so unpredictable; they didn’t follow the same rules for living like country folk in the South, where if a thing was done, it was done for good.

  The baby squirmed, and Noon leaned on her elbow so she could face her. She pecked the child’s forehead and smoothed at her hair and wondered if she could feel any more motherly about her very own child than she did right now with this abandoned baby next to her and the sunlight splashing in through the stark white curtains. She pictured the mothers she used to help the midwives tend. She’d watch them as their babies suckled their high and firm breasts. How complete they must have felt. How devastated she herself felt when she was examined by Lula, the midwife blessed with the gift of healing. And when Lula had mouthed the words “Shame ’fore God what they to did to you,” Noon’s heart froze. She felt a chill even now as she remembered how Lula’s eyes filled up as she’d covered Noon’s lower body with the stiff white sheet as if she were covering the mangled face of a dead child. She’d told Noon then that her womb would never issue forth a birth. Despite the praying over her, the sassafras teas, the salves made from this herb or that leaf, the cornstarch soaks to soothe the pain, the scarring was just too thick, too permanent to dissolve.

  She pushed her hand down into her pink flannel nightgown and grabbed at her own breasts. They felt flaccid and heavy. “Young as I am, breasts ain’t got no business feeling like this,” she muttered. At least they were warm now. At night, when Herbie reached for her, they’d go cold and shrivel up like a prune. At least now they were warm and smooth.

  The baby was getting hungry again. Noon could tell because her mouth was pursing and smacking and opening and closing with sucking motions. She listened for Herbie’s loud and rhythmic snoring. She pulled her nightgown from her shoulder and lifted her breast and just held it in her hand for a while. Then she closed her eyes tightly and guided her breast straight to the infant’s hungry mouth. The baby clamped her mouth around Noon’s breast and pulled in hard, instinctively, pulling for milk. Noon felt a pain that started at her nipple and ricocheted through her body to her deepest parts. She almost cried out; were it not for Herbie on the other side of the baby, snoring soundly, she would have cried out. The baby did cry. Pulling on emptiness, she cried, and twisted her head so that Noon’s breast fell from her mouth and hung there, wet from the child’s spit and exposed.

  The commotion jostled Herbie, who sat up with a start. “What’s wrong with her, why she acting like that? She all right, Noon? Noon, is she all right?”

  “Just hungry, is all,” Noon said as she turned quickly so that her back was to Herbie, and then, covering herself up, rolled out of the bed. “I’ll warm her bottle, that’s all she needs right now; a little milk and she’ll go right back to sleep.” She pushed her feet into her soft pink slippers and rushed out of the room before Herbie could see her shame.

  In the kitchen everything was yellow and orange except for the white sink-tub, next to the off-white gas-powered stove that had set them back $59.95. Noon ran the water hot over her softest dish towel and pressed it to her breast. Guess even that newborn know these breasts can’t make no milk, wonder if she know I don’t bleed right either, wonder if everybody knows. Wonder if they can look at me and see the best of my feelings were snatched away. She patted herself dry and started mixing milk and water and Karo syrup into the bottle that had been packed in the cardboard box. Still don’t mean I can’t be a good mother, she thought. Just ’cause my body ain’t ripe for it don’t mean my heart and my mind ain’t. I could sure be a better mother to that child upstairs than her natural mother. Somebody probably know that too. Probably why they left her out there. Somebody know already I’d be as good as Mary was to Jesus. Humph, takes more than dripping titties to make a good mother.

  She scuffed out of the kitchen and through the dining room that was as immaculate as the rest of the house. She walked back into the bedroom, where Herbie stood at the window bouncing the infant along his shoulder. His back was bare, and she thought that his shoulders looked wider with the baby’s dark hair peeking over the top.

  “Aren’t you chilly standing next to that drafty window bare-chested?”

  “Amazing how much heat this little body sends off,” Herbie answered as he turned and smiled as contented a smile as Noon had ever seen.

  Noon was struck by the contentment settling in good on Herbie’s brow. She knew then that a baby was exactly what Herbie needed to calm him down some, keep him out of those clubs where the women ogled over his honest smile and half-straight hair and eyes as dark as his skin was light. A baby like this might even get him into a church service or two. She felt as sad for him as for herself that they couldn’t claim this child as their own.

  “You getting mighty attached.” Noon took the baby from him. “It’s only gonna make it harder when we got to give her up later today.”

  “I was gonna say the same thing about you getting attached, you know how sensitive you are about things.” Herbie rubbed his stomach as he talked.

  Noon looked at the baby so that she didn’t have to watch his hands make circles over his stomach, which was hairy and flat. “Well, since we on the subject”—she paused and took a deep breath—“I want to get Reverend Schell over here to pray over the chile, later, maybe, after I get her bathed down, and she gets in another nap. I’ll feel better knowing she’s leaving here under special blessings.”

  Herbie agreed quickly, even though he wasn’t big on prayer in the public sort of way that Reverend Schell went about it. “Okay, you call Schell, and I’ll go around the corner and tell Big Carl from the club to stop by. He hears rumors before they’re spoken. Maybe he heard of someone having a baby, and now don’t have the baby to show.”

  “I been thinking too,” Noon said as she busied herself changing the baby’s diaper. “Since today is Saturday and all, and no one’s at work down there at City Hall besides maybe the police—well, I was thinking, she might as well stay the weekend. She’s sure no trouble, and Pet milk and Karo sure isn’t an extra expense. I can pull out a dresser drawer and empty it and line it, and she can sleep right in there.”

  “Might as well stay the weekend then.” Herbie went to Noon and pecked her on the mouth. “If that’s what you want, then she can stay the weekend.” He looked down on the bed, and the baby’s eyes were dancing as Noon pinned the diaper together. He reached in and pinched the baby’s cheek and felt the talc- and cocoa-butter-scented warmth he’d felt la
st night on the steps.

  Afternoon came quickly on Saturdays in this part of South Philly. The morning melted from sunrise to afternoon while the neighbors scrubbed the steps outside and poured buckets of bleach and hot water through the back alleys. They shined their windows and did their in-the-house work and then shopped on Ninth Street or South Street or Washington Avenue. One to five was catch-up time: to wonder where the morning went, to sew, to fry hair with a hot comb and a tin of Royal Crown grease, to get in on a card game at Rose’s, or a special-call choir rehearsal, to go to Bow’s for a cut, Royale for a shot, Pop’s for a hoagie, or a car ride to Eden to put flowers on somebody’s grave. This Saturday from one until five they crowded into Noon and Herbie’s because news of the baby spread as quickly as the morning went.

  Reverend Schell came, and Noon’s choir member friends, the deacons, people from the block, from around the corner, Big Carl from Royale, and Herbie’s buddies from the train station. Somebody brought in a crate of fried chicken, somebody else an army pot filled with potato salad; they brought spirits from the club, coffee from the church. One came with a cradle, another with a large wooden playpen, another with a bag filled up with baby clothes. They piled into the neat Lombard Street row house from the kitchen to the front steps. They sat along the arms of the couch and on the steps and the floor. They clapped and sang, danced worldly dances, prayed holy prayers, and chatted excitedly about the baby in the box.

  “Just like that, huh? Box was just sitting on the steps, huh?” Reverend Schell asked, as he sipped at his steaming cup of coffee.

  “Just sitting like it was waiting for me to see it,” Herbie answered, drinking his chilled wine. “Might have tripped over it in the dark, but they had her all in pink that acted like a light as I was on my way up the steps. Then I picked her up and she started to cry, but I rocked her a little and she got quiet and content like she was just waiting for me to come and rock her.”

  “You thought about calling the police?” asked Dottie, who lived across the street.

  “No need to call the authorities. That child is a gift from God,” Reverend Schell boomed. “We got to learn how to handle our own affairs without always getting white folks to intervene.”

  “Wait a minute,” Herbie said slowly. “You saying you think we should keep the chile.”

  “What else you gonna do with her? Where I come from, which is right here in Philadelphia born and raised, we take care of our own.”

  “But I thought they were stricter with the laws here in Philadelphia,” Herbie said excitedly. Then he called into the dining room, where Noon and a roomful of women were passing the baby from hand to hand.

  “Noon,” he said, “come on in here. Your reverend is saying we should just keep the baby.”

  “It’s been on my heart to suggest that,” Noon spouted as she moved through the throng of people into the living room. “I know down Florida it happened to two families that I know of, somebody left children with them and the people just raised them as their own.”

  “Well, down in Mississippi,” Herbie said, taking the baby from Noon, “everybody raised everybody else’s children anyhow. At least it was that way with me since my mama died when I was seven and my daddy was a Pullman porter and away for stretches at a time. My brother and me got all the mothering we needed from any of a number of good-cooking women.”

  “So y’all in agreement then, right?” Reverend Schell looked from Noon to Herbie. “Y’all gonna keep the baby, right?”

  Noon looked at Herbie and smiled, almost shyly. “I was gonna suggest it this morning, but I didn’t know how you’d take to such a notion so suddenly, having the finances of a baby’s upkeep thrust on you.”

  “You should have spoken it then,” Herbie said. “I was thinking along the same lines, but I thought that was a suggestion that should come from you, you being the woman, and the baby’s tending to being your responsibility.” He moved in close to Noon and handed the baby back to her and then covered his wife’s shoulders with his arms. “I just want you to be happy, Noon.”

  “Seems like it’s settled to me,” Reverend Schell said. “God bless the new parents.”

  “Still seem to me like the court or somebody official needs to be involved,” Dottie countered. She rested her hand on Herbie’s forearm and squeezed it lightly.

  “Now let me say something to you, Sister Dottie,” Reverend Schell bellowed, raising his hand high. “What’s a bunch of white folks gonna do once they get their hands on this baby? They just gonna turn her over to a foster family, and I’m telling you the Lord has already handpicked the family. Noon and Herbie have just had a blessing laid at their doorsteps. No need to be second-guessing the hand of God. Sometimes the Lord’s work and man’s work don’t always mesh. And when that happens, I’m going with the Lord every time.” He loosened his tie and cleared his throat for preaching.

  Herbie reached up to Reverend Schell, who towered over him, grabbed Reverend Schell’s cup, and put his arm around his shoulder. “Now, Rev, you been a good pastor to my wife this past year that we been here in Philadelphia. And I promise, I do plan to visit you in the House of the Lord one of these Sundays. But Reverend, if you fixing to preach right here and now, we got to trade off cups ’cause I’m sure gonna need some coffee and I do believe you could benefit from some wine.”

  The rooms from the kitchen to the front door exploded with laughter. These were downtown folks. Holy Ghost-filled to whiskey-inspired, bartender to deacon, jazz singer to choir member, the separations fell away when there was an occasion for a grand coming together such as this.

  “I will say this,” Cardplaying-Rose offered, “you won’t have to worry ’bout that mother coming back for the chile. Whoever left that chile cares for her. They know just what they doing. Ain’t coming back. No offense to you, Reverend, but I saw Queen of Hearts in my reading this morning. Means motherly love, they ain’t coming back.”

  “Sister Rose, I agree the mother won’t return, but my source is more reliable than a deck of cards. It’s the word of God—”

  “Rev, Rev, Rev,” Herbie cut in. “So what we got to do legally? I mean, what about birth certificates?”

  “First thing Monday morning”—Reverend Schell placed his hand on Herbie’s shoulder as he spoke—“go down to City Hall, to the department that handles birth certificates. Tell them one of your relatives from down South left the baby for you to raise, and you want to do whatever paperwork you need to do so you don’t get any of their undereyed looks when it’s time for the chile to get enrolled in school. And you sure don’t have to worry about anybody gathered here saying anything different. To intercede in the workings of God that way might bring damnation to us all. Am I right, Sister Dottie?” He looked over at his shoulder and squinted his eyes at Dottie.

  “I was only saying that the law—”

  “Damnation! Sister Dottie, am I right?” Reverend Schell cut her off.

  “You right, Reverend,” Dottie mumbled, trying to shake off the collected gaze of the roomful of people.

  “Now you give me your Bible,” Reverend Schell said, “and I’m gonna make it legal right now in the sight of God. That’s what I love about my God, we don’t have to wait till Monday morning to do our business with the Lord.”

  “Ain’t it the truth,” someone shouted, until sounds of agreement rippled through the whole house.

  “Now, what you gonna call her?” Reverend Schell asked as he patted his breast pocket and then handed the Bible to Herbie. “Left my glasses home, but you can do this part. Just turn the gold-trimmed pages of this beautiful white leather Bible to the one marked ‘Birth Certificate,’ and you take this with you Monday, let them put their official stamp to it.”

  The memory of the early morning fell over Herbie like a wave as he moved his fingers over the thin, soft pages. He thought about the way the air felt at his back as he pushed up Lombard Street right before he stumbled upon the box. And then the eyes, as the air fanned the flame of the
match and made the baby’s eyes dance in the flickering light.

  “Fannie!” he shouted. “Her name’s Fannie. The name just came to me; it fits her too. That name all right by you, Noon?”

  “Fannie it is,” Noon answered.

  “Just put it right there on that top line of that page, then fill in the date and hand it here and let me put my scribble to it.” Reverend Schell’s voice was filled with jubilation.

  They cheered and shouted. Reverend Schell prayed over the infant. Afterward they raised their cups filled with wine, or juice, or milk, or coffee, or vodka, or tea. The merriment even sifted out of the front door, onto the street, where even more people had gathered to hear about the baby in the box.

  Noon’s round face beamed as she sat propped in the deep green armchair. She ran her hand along the baby’s hair and almost seemed to blush. “Fannie,” she said again. “Who would’ve thought it? Noon and Herbie’s baby girl named Fannie.”

  THREE

  Herbie didn’t have the urge to play cards at Rose’s that night, or catch Ella at the Mercantile Hall on Broad Street, or Morris Mosely and the Dukes at O. V. Catto on Sixteenth and Fitzwater. He didn’t feel like popping his head into the red- and blue-lit air of any of a half-dozen South Street nightspots, not even his main spot, Club Royale. Big Carl and the guys from the club had told him they’d heard Ethel was back. But he even dismissed, if only for right now, the desire to find her. Noon stayed in too. Tomorrow was Founders’ Day at the church, and by right she should have been there to help peel white potatoes, and clean chickens for frying, and snap string beans, and season the shoulders of pork for roasting. But there was a baby in the house. Even the rooms and the furniture seemed to vibrate with a whispered warmth that was like a heartbeat. The kitchen, which looked out past the shed to where the sycamore tree was just pushing out buds, now held a pot half filled with water waiting on the stove to be heated for a bottle. The breakfast room table was adorned with an overturned mixing bowl that covered a plate of peach cobbler or coconut cake depending on Noon’s taste for baking; now the table also held a neat row of Pet milk in short cans. The dining room table with the large scalloped legs that looked like a turtle’s legs was now covered over with a rubber-backed burlap spread because Noon had used the table’s wide sturdiness for washing the baby down. Even in the living room, where the walls were white and smooth and the couch was deep green and soft to sit on, gently folded cotton diapers were now stacked four deep along the couch’s arm.