Tumbling

by Diane McKinney-Whetstone

  “That singing woman left her here. Left her money, clothes, told her she was coming here to live while she goes away for a while. Ain’t that mean? Just dropped the poor chile off, no preparation, no nothing. Dirty, low-down, mean that was.”

  “She just wanted her to have a sister,” Fannie interrupted.

  “Chile been calling for her, crying for her all day. But that’s okay, me and Fannie worked on her, we got her feeling better, till you came in here probably looking mean and scared her all over again.”

  “You didn’t mean to.” Fannie laughed excitedly. “You didn’t even know I had a new sister, did you?” And then, pulling him down, she reached into Herbie’s pocket and snatched out her licorice. “Here, Liz, Herbie bought licorice. If you don’t cry, we can eat it all.” Fannie fed Liz bits of red licorice as Noon rocked her from side to side. Herbie stood in the doorway, trying with everything in him not to let his broken heart show on his face.

  Noon was ecstatic in the still darkness of their bedroom after she’d gotten Liz settled back down. She felt chosen that a blazing, blues-singing whore the likes of Ethel would select her for raising up her child. Unlike with Fannie, whose arrival was more arbitrary, finding Liz on her steps gave Noon a sense of womanness that she thought might be as good as getting her passions stirred. She hated Ethel with everything in her, hated her look, the way she overpainted her face, the way she walked, parading her womanhood as if her backside were a piece of fine china. She thought it despicable the way she’d just abandoned poor Liz. But here was some womanly thing that Noon could do well. She could raise up what Ethel never could. And now Noon knew that if the likes of Ethel recognized her maternal prowess, surely everyone must know. Now she could stop fretting so much over the problems with her body, wondering if other people could tell that she didn’t have a nature to her. She was too buoyed by this feeling of being a whole woman, this event of being singled out to love somebody’s child.

  She acted mad over it on the outside. Right now she buzzed to Herbie, “Terrible thing she did to that poor chile, just leaving her on the steps like that. I knew that hussy was up to something walking up and down this street last Sunday like something she wanted lived on it. At first I thought it was you. Now I know it was a home for that chile.”

  “She can’t stay, Noon,” Herbie said, agitated, but relieved nonetheless to be in this darkened bedroom, under the covers and safe from Liz’s frightened eyes. “You can’t just take no child in and claim her just ’cause she was left on your steps.”

  “Can, and will,” Noon snapped. “Did it with Fannie.”

  “Fannie was different. She was a newborn; we didn’t even know where she came from.”

  “Well, what am I supposed to do, turn her over to the state? You know they don’t care a thing ’bout poor little colored children; stick her in a foster home is all they’ll do where all somebody want is the money. I don’t have it in me to do that to that child. Reverend Schell said to look at it as a gift from God. According to Round-the-Corner-Rose, her aunt’s more into living the fast life than taking care of the chile. So Reverend Schell said to look at it as God giving the child a good home where she can learn about the love of Jesus.”

  “Tell Reverend Schell to clothe and feed her then,” Herbie grunted. “This is the second time this shit has happened. We keep that girl, we might as well hang a sign in the window, ‘Tired of doing for your kid, just leave ’em here, good ole Noon and Herbie’ll raise ’em up without a complaint.’ Or better yet, we’ll take out an ad in the Tribune: ‘Home for unwanted kids, we want ’em when you don’t.’ I tell you, Noon, we can’t keep that child. Fannie was one thing, granted, but it ain’t right to let other people burden us with their responsibilities, no forewarning, no nothing. Just dump them on our steps.”

  “Wait a minute, Herbie, these little colored children is all our responsibilities, the Scripture says, ‘Suffer the little children to come unto me.’”

  “Oh, now you Jesus Christ. Now you ready to take on all the children.”

  “You didn’t let me finish.”

  “Ain’t nothing to finish when you start quoting Scriptures. If your church is so giving, take the child there. Must be one or two members want a little girl. Now to me that would be the Christian thing to do.”

  “But she was left here!”

  “Don’t mean she got to stay here. Shit, Reverend Schell always got so much to say, let him have a greater hand in being responsible for the child.”

  “For your information he offered to do a collection every other month to help out with her raising.”

  “Wonderful, and I’ll contribute generously just as long as her raising ain’t taking place in my house.”

  “But I already told him we’re keeping her. We blessed already with you having a decent job, plus at least the no-good aunt did send more than enough money to start her out. And she promised to send more money. It might not even have to cost us any extra money. And Fannie loves her already. You should have seen her running to tell me to hurry up so we could help her. Poor little Liz. We turn her over and she gonna have to suffer through investigators asking her questions like she a criminal. She ain’t the bold type of child like Fannie. That chile has a weak constitution. I see it in her eyes. It ain’t right to put her through that, Herbie. It ain’t Christian, especially not when we got the means to give her a good home.”

  Noon went on talking in long sentences about their moral obligation to keep the child. Herbie got quiet. The last thing he needed was Ethel’s niece living under his roof. The eyes, scared and knowing. He couldn’t look at those eyes day in and day out, waiting for her to blurt it out to Noon where she knew him from. But then he also understood how to carry things; a porter, he certainly would. He knew the importance of balance. If he carried something slung over his chest, he’d best sling an equal amount over his back. If his right side leaned too much from the baggage, he knew to shift some to his left. If he stooped low, he kept his back straight and his shoulders high, lest he snap his spine. He loved Ethel. Here in the blackened bedroom that was never hot, he had to admit he loved Ethel. He was infuriated for sure, mired in it, sinking in it like quicksand. He even hated Ethel right now for having the incomprehensible gall to leave Liz with them. But he loved her. She wasn’t just a hot body that writhed and arched in spasms that spilled over with the smoothness of silk. She wasn’t just some sex-crazed whore who’d give it up to anything with a lump between his legs. He could reconcile that given Noon’s condition and all, he could come home and sleep next to Noon like a well-fed baby. Even stick out his chest at Royale and whisper about his good thing on the side. She was Ethel, though. And he loved her. That was his crime. Married man had no business crossing the line like that. The guilt that he carried over that would surely break his back if not properly balanced out: left and right, front and rear, high and low. Agreeing to Liz’s staying just because that’s what Noon wanted would keep his spine erect. Keep it from buckling, warping, even snapping in two from the extra weight he carried on his heart.

  “Indefinitely.” He forced the word into the darkness as he pictured Liz running down the hallway. “She can stay till we see if the aunt come back or we figure something out to do with her.”

  TWELVE

  Liz ran from Herbie for a solid year. That summer she sat on the front steps thinking that maybe if she sat so still that she was barely breathing the hot air, maybe Ethel would turn the corner and pick her up just like she’d left her. By surprise. Ethel never did turn the corner. Cross-the-Street-Dottie, Sister Maybell, Next-Door-Jeanie, Reverend Schell, Bow the Barber, the milkman, the iceman, the insurance man, the man selling brooms and venetian blinds, they all turned the corner. Each time Liz saw one of them move up the block and she realized it wasn’t her aunt Ethel, her stomach sank until it felt as if it were going to fall right through her shorts onto the grainy concrete steps. Then Herbie would turn the corner walking fast, half bouncing, and Liz would think that he was
the one that made Ethel leave, always over there late at night.

  All winter Liz watched for her. Through the orange November sun and the steady glow of the Christmas lights, she stood at the window and leaned against the radiator until the heat threatened to burn through her pleated wool skirts or pinwheel corduroy pants. The grayness that overtook January settled in her stomach as she pressed against the radiator, waiting for Ethel. Ethel never moved up those steps, though. Herbie did, like clockwork. His form was like a shadow that Liz was sure must be the shadow that Ethel described in the bedtime stories whenever the big bad wolf appeared.

  By spring she could still feel the print of Ethel’s lips when she had kissed her good-bye that day, the press of her arms when she squeezed her so hard she almost smothered her in the whiffs of cocoa butter and sweet perfume. She could even hear the sound of Ethel’s high heels clicking down Lombard Street.

  On Easter Sunday she was sure Ethel would come for her. She heard so many high heels clicking against the concrete, over and over. She could hardly settle down. Even when she and Fannie were all dressed up in straw bonnets, and patent leather shoes with T-straps, and pink and green dresses that billowed over three-tiered crinoline slips as they waited outside until Noon came out to take them to Sunday school. Then the tall, light Willie Mann begged them to be still so he could take some pictures; Liz could hardly be still. The sounds of high heels distracted her. But they weren’t Ethel’s heels.

  By the time the year rounded out into summer again, she stopped looking for Ethel, she almost stopped hoping. But she still ran when Herbie appeared. She ran to avoid his eyes, which always stared at her with a question mark as if he were waiting for her to blurt something out. She ran to try to run away from the feeling that she had for Herbie that she knew was hate, even though the Sunday school teacher said that hate was a sin and sinners got sent straight to the devil. Now it was such a big feeling that it needed more than Herbie; it started to spread to Ethel, started to lump Herbie and Ethel in the same circle in her stomach. It was a scary feeling, and she especially ran from that.

  But she loved Noon and Fannie. They were her mother and sister now. Closer than real blood, Noon always said. Real blood rises up against itself and turns bad. We’re closer than real blood in that way, don’t never have to worry about it turning bad. Liz gobbled it up. She so needed that feeling of warmth and protection that she used to get from Ethel when they snuggled at night and Ethel chased the monsters away. Liz needed a monster chased right now as she ran up Lombard Street, gasping, red plaits flopping.

  It was 1946. Time for Fannie and Liz to start school according to state law. Noon had gone to register them two weeks before. She’d presented Dottie, her across-the-street neighbor and clerk at the E. M. Stanton Elementary School, with Fannie’s papers. Pointed out to her that Fannie’s booster shots were up-to-date, that she had no known allergies, and yes, Noon and Herbie were her legal guardians by the official seal on the gold-edged birth certificate Reverend Schell had put his scribble to six years before.

  Dottie tapped her pencil point against the long wooden counter in the school office. She was a diligent worker. Even though she’d fought last night with the latest in a series of no-count men and woke so drunk on loneliness that she’d vomited all the way to the bathroom, she was still at her post in the school office by seven forty-five.

  The office was quiet and warm, just Dottie and Noon and the eighteen-by-twenty oil reproduction of Abraham Lincoln. Dottie cleared her throat as Noon held her breath. Looked at Noon in her button-down dress with the vertical stripes, the one that had been featured as the dress of the week in the Tribune’s Ladies’ Sewing Circle section. Seersucker. Got the nerve to use seersucker, Dottie thought. Twenty-five cents a yard. She knew because she’d priced it the day after she’d seen the picture in the paper. Had run all the way home from Fourth Street to pull her spare change from the sock beneath her mattress. The sock was empty, her man in a drunken stupor on the living room couch. Took Noon to wear the very fabric that would remind her of that, she thought. She’d never liked Noon much. Even though they’d worked on the same auxiliaries for the good of the church, met around the same dining room tables to plan for things like block beautification, Dottie had always taken Noon’s keep-to-herself quietness as better-than-thou smugness. Even the aroma of salt pork frying and biscuits baking that streamed from Noon’s house each morning as Dottie rushed past it on her way to work was a reminder that her own child had just gulped down dry toast and powdered milk.

  Noon felt the sweep of Dottie’s eyes from head to toe. She chided herself at that instant for wearing her newest dress. Should have put on the faded blue cotton, she told herself, or the gray with the mismatched belt. She’d watched Dottie the past couple of years go out of her way to speak to Herbie, to laugh at his jokes, to let her hand linger on his arm when she told him, “Herbie, you a mess.” She knew when she needed something from Dottie’s type what her mother said was true: “Homely gets from homely what pretty never could.” But it was too late now. She had waved her relative affluence in Dottie’s face like a matador’s cape.

  Dottie charged. Reminded Noon as she shook the pencil in her thin dark hands that she had been there that day Fannie’s birth certificate was made out. “You know I know about this seal you ran down and had them put on Fannie’s birth certificate. If you want to call it a birth certificate. You know those supposed relatives that you told those people at City Hall gave you the chile for you to raise are as bogus as a three-cent piece.”

  Noon pleaded with Dottie in a hushed outpouring of superlatives on the bond that happened between them all that day. How they were witness to the workings of the hand of God, just like Reverend Schell had said. How to make mention of it in other than their close-knit circle of those who knew and understood might bring damnation to them all.

  Dottie hated even this about Noon. That she would know the very thing, the only thing, to say that would give her pause. She reminded Noon that there was still the other one. Did she have any papers for that one with the red hair?

  “You know I don’t,” Noon said in a tone that also asked, Why do you hate me so? “You know her aunt just left her for me to raise. She didn’t go through any official channels, no papers; you know that already, Dottie. You were right out front the day it happened and I was telling Jeanie and Sis Maybell and Bow, didn’t you come running across the street to see what was going on?”

  “Well, you can’t register her without papers. Doctors’ forms and a birth certificate or proof of legal guardianship,” Dottie answered in a voice that said, Because you think you so much better than me with your steady husband with a decent job and your neat little flower ledge out front. “In fact, I got to turn her name in. Anybody six and not registered gets the name sent in to Social Services.”

  “And what they gonna do with her name?”

  “Don’t know, not for me to know. I’m told to turn in the name, so I turn in the name.”

  “Can’t you just tell me what I got to do instead?” Noon looked straight in Dottie’s eyes. Past her lips, painted too red for her complexion, her cheeks powdered with a shade too light, to get to her eyes, where the brows were penciled too hard.

  Dottie wouldn’t meet her gaze. “Get a lawyer.”

  “Dottie, I don’t know what I ever did to you to make you—”

  “Look, I’m letting you register Fannie.” She tapped the pencil, leaving angry, jagged lines on the pad.

  “But you could put Liz’s name right there under where you put Fannie’s. You could list me and Herbie as her legal guardians. Nobody will ask. Nobody else really cares. Now you could just pretend like I have proof of legal guardianship. You could do that right now, Dottie, and you know it.”

  “The law is the law,” she said as she dropped the pencil against the counter. “I ain’t breaking the law for you or nobody else.”

  “Whose law?” Noon huffed as she snatched Fannie’s papers up and rushed from
the office. “Whose law at all?”

  It was a hungry, fast-moving law. Moved quicker than Noon could get an appointment with the young black lawyer that Next-Door-Jeanie recommended. The following week, his secretary had promised, as she underestimated just how quickly the system would work. For the system had gained some sophistication in the last six years. Where Fannie was easily allowed to Herbie and Noon with all the rights of legal guardianship on their say-so that relatives had left the child for them to raise, now the war had ended, men needed work—a politician’s nephew, a poll watcher’s son. The patronage system was starving for the enforcement of this law: the need to hire caseworkers, truant officers, writ servers. At least a half dozen good-paying positions could be justified if people like Dottie just did as they were told and wrote down the names of children like Liz, children who were six and not yet registered for school.

  Liz was oblivious of the employment boom her situation caused as she decided to try out her independence this day. Usually never going more than a few yards without making sure Fannie or Noon was in sight, she decided to walk all the way around the corner by herself to see if Julep could come outside and play jacks while Noon was on Fourth Street buying buttons and thread and embroidery hoops. Fannie had agreed; while Liz was walking around the corner, she would find the jacks’ ball and meet Liz and Julep out front.

  Liz was almost to the corner, feeling very big and proud. The sun was hot and bright, and the air had the smell of damp cotton when it’s steam-ironed. She started to skip in her rubber-soled buckskins, didn’t notice the freckled white man as he cursed at his brakes and bore down hard to park the used De Soto at the corner of Lombard Street. He had one of those jobs supported by the newly enforced truancy law. Responsible for serving summonses to the families of school-age children not registered to attend. Worked on a commission basis. Started out early today so he could do enough business to get his brakes fixed, maybe take his girl to a drive-in motel. These prospective truants were quick and easy. Still two weeks before school started, so these were mostly first notices. Most times the parents couldn’t speak the language anyway, so he didn’t have to hear long explanations. First one he’d had in the colored section, though. Hoped they had street addresses visible so he wouldn’t have to spend time hunting for the proper house. He checked his city-embossed blue-backed papers before getting out of the car. Scanned them for the line that read, “Birthmarks or other distinguishing physical characteristics.” Noted that it listed red hair. Thanked his good luck when he saw the red-haired child skipping right by the car. Checked his papers again for the name, then rushed from the car, yelling, “Liz,” with a measure of assurance that he had the right child. “Don’t run from me, I need to talk to the people you live with.”