by Tayari Jones
RALEIGH WANTED TO MARRY my mother. That Wednesday over Tonk he put his cards on the table, in more ways than one. He said, “Gwen, you deserve something better than this. You deserve to be somebody’s only wife.”
She didn’t take him seriously at first. She said, “Pick up your hand, I can see al your cards and that takes the fun out of it.”
“I’m serious.”
She laughed. “Wel , do you have someone in mind? Do you know somebody that wants to take me away from al of this?”
“I’m serious, Gwen,” he said. “I have been thinking about this for a few years now, and I want to make a real commitment to you and to Dana.”
My mother placed her cards on the table facedown, like she thought that they could pick up their game once this awkward conversation was through. “What are you saying, Raleigh? What are you saying to me exactly?”
“I am asking you to marry me. To be my wife. Legal y. Respectful y.”
My mother got up from the table and went to the couch and sat herself on the space where the cushion was split. Raleigh fol owed her. He was so long and lanky that he moved like something engineered to bend with the breeze.
Raleigh kept talking. “We can get our own house and live like ordinary people. I am already Dana’s father on paper, so there is nothing complicated to figure out. And don’t worry about James. He’l come around. He’s got to see that it’s not fair the way that he’s been able to live for the past nine years. He’l have to see that it makes sense for you and me to be together. It wil be better for Dana. James, he’s got more already than any one person can hope for.” He took my mother’s hands and held them to his mouth. “What do you say, Gwen?”
“You haven’t said that you love me,” my mother said. “Why are you doing this? You don’t love me.”
“Yes, I do,” Raleigh said. “I love you something terrible. I love you to my bones. I love you, Gwendolyn Yarboro.”
“No, you don’t,” my mother said.
“Yes. I’ve loved you since that first day I met you hiding in your bed at that rooming house. Please, Gwen. Let’s do this.”
My mother said, “I don’t know.”
“You don’t know what?” Raleigh said. “You don’t know if I love you or if you love me?”
“I know for sure that I don’t love you,” my mother said. “Not in that way. But I don’t know if you love me, either.”
Raleigh leaned back on the couch. “You don’t love me? Not at al ?”
“I love you some,” Gwen said. “But you are my husband’s brother. There’s a different way you love your brother-in-law.”
“You are not my brother’s wife,” said Raleigh. “He is not my brother and you are not his wife.”
“I don’t know,” Gwen said.
“You know, Gwen,” Raleigh said. “You know it.” He got up from the couch and put Louis Armstrong on the record player. “Dance with me,” he said, holding his arms out.
“This is not a movie,” my mother said, suddenly angry. “Dancing with you won’t make this right or wrong. You are asking me to give up my whole life for this.”
“I am asking you to marry me.”
“I don’t know, Raleigh,” my mother said.
FIVE DAYS LATER, she was dressed in her blue suit sitting with me in the back of the old Lincoln.
“Dana,” my mother said. “What would you say about Uncle Raleigh becoming your new daddy?”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, how would you feel if we went to go live with Uncle Raleigh and he would be your daddy and I would stil be your mother — I wil always be your mother, there’s no changing that ever — but it would be me, you, and Raleigh living together.”
“You can do that?”
“People can do whatever they want.”
I thought it over while scratching the mosquito bites on my legs. “What about James? I can’t have two daddies, can I?”
“James wil always be your father.”
“So what about Uncle Raleigh?”
“Okay,” my mother said. “It’s like this. When you get older, you wil say to people, ‘My real father didn’t raise me. My mother married my uncle and so I think of my uncle as my father.’ You get it?”
“No.”
“Dana,” my mother said, “let’s try this from another direction. If you could pick just one daddy, who would it be? Raleigh or James?”
“I don’t know.”
“It’s up to you, Dana. Tel me what you want, because al I want is what’s best for you.”
“If we pick Raleigh to be my daddy, would James be mad at us?”
My mother said, “Yes.”
“What about Uncle Raleigh? If you say he can’t be my daddy, wil he be mad at me?”
“His feelings wil be hurt.”
“Wil he cry?”
My mother thought it over for a moment. “He might cry, but not when you are around. You won’t have to look at him crying.”
In the back of the Lincoln, I felt comfortable and cool for the first time in almost two weeks. I wished my mother and I could stay there forever, mul ing over our options, being loved by my father and Raleigh at once.
“I don’t want to hurt Uncle Raleigh’s feelings.”
“Me either, honey, but somebody’s going to get hurt in this. There’s no getting around it.” She gathered me against her even though she was so clean and pretty and I was Alabama-dirty and sorghum-sticky. “I love you, Dana,” she said. “I love you more than anyone.” She pressed her face into my filthy hair. “You are my life.”
I used to love her desperate love for me, her weighty kisses. Hers was an electric affection burning away everything it touched, leaving me only with the clean lines of a lightning rod.
“Mama,” I said.
“Yes?”
“What about James? If we go off with Raleigh, he’l just live with his wife and his other girl?”
“Yes.”
“That’s not fair.”
“Not fair to who, baby?”
“It’s not fair that they get to just have James al by theirself.”
“No,” my mother said. “It’s not fair.”
“Why can’t they be the ones to go be with Raleigh?”
“It doesn’t work like that,” my mother said.
My mother sat beside me, leaving everything in my nine-year-old hands. I couldn’t bear the idea of Chaurisse having my father al to herself, cal ing him Daddy and living her life like she was in a Beverly Cleary book. Even then, I understood Raleigh to be a good person, an excel ent uncle, but an uncle wasn’t the same thing as a daddy. There wasn’t any such thing as a “new daddy.” You got one father in the beginning, and that was it.
Through the tinted glass of the Lincoln, the scene on the front porch looked foreboding, as though a storm had come to town like a sinister carnival. Raleigh had his camera aimed at Wil ie Mae, who laughed and tossed a handful of pea hul s at him. He pressed the shutter again and again.
(In 1988, when we buried Wil ie Mae, I wanted to put one of those pictures on her funeral program, but my mother said she wouldn’t have wanted to look so country. I have them stil , in a silver box, beside my gold earrings.)
“Wil we stil get to see Uncle Raleigh if he’s not my new daddy?”
My mother nodded. “Raleigh’s like us. He doesn’t have anywhere else to go.”
“Let’s just keep it like it is,” I said. “Can we do that?”
MY MOTHER AND I got out of the car together. She held my hand as though I were a flower girl. As we approached the porch, Raleigh stood up, sending a shower of purple-tinted hul s to the floor, some landing on his just-shined shoes.
“We need to talk to you,” my mother said.
“Al right,” Raleigh said.
“In private,” my mother said.
Wil ie Mae took my arm with the same firm grip she’d used just the night before when snatching me away from her uncle. “Leave her here with me, Gwen. Don’t get
her al tangled up in grown folks’ business.”
My mother let me go; my free hand fel to my side.
“There’s no privacy,” Wil ie Mae said. “Except in the car.”
Raleigh said, “I don’t want to talk in the car. I don’t want to get in that car.” He was getting antsy, shifting his weight around, causing his camera to bounce on his chest against his pretty yel ow tie.
“Go out in the back, then,” Wil ie Mae said. “You’l have to go through the kitchen, but you can be alone out there.”
They went into the house, saying “Excuse me” to the women and cousins clustered there. They would be confused until we had gone, and Wil ie Mae would explain that Raleigh wasn’t real y a white man, he just looked like one. At least one person would claim to have suspected it al along.
I sat back on the porch with Wil ie Mae and the pan of peas. She broke the seal of each pod with her fingernail and shoved the glossy peas out with her thumb.
“She’s out there breaking his heart, huh?” Wil ie Mae said, without looking over at me.
“We are going to keep everything like it is,” I said.
Wil ie Mae shrugged. “It’s her life.”
I struggled for a while with the peas, while Wil ie Mae’s hands zipped through the task.
“She asked me who I wanted for my daddy.”
“She did?”
“I told her I wanted to keep my same daddy.”
“Gwen should know better than to put that weight on you.”
“Is she going to tel Uncle Raleigh that I didn’t want him for my daddy?”
Wil ie Mae put the pan of peas on the floor near her feet. “No, honey. Gwen would never sel you down the river like that. Whatever you want to say about her when you get grown, you can never say that she betrayed you.”
RALEIGH AND MY MOTHER had their conversation in the backyard among the laundry. The sheets provided wet curtains, sealing them in with the clean-soap sweetness and the unforgiving scent of bleach. They were standing where Wil ie Mae had taught me to hide the secret things, the clothes you didn’t want visible from the street. I asked her to hang al my things there, not just my underwear, but my shorts, T-shirts, socks, even the towels I used. She laughed but did as I asked.
Wil ie Mae and I moved ourselves to the kitchen, where the women stirred pots and wiped sweat from their faces. We kept our eyes on the screen door, but we couldn’t see anything but the sheets, stil and impassive.
“Just keep your ears open,” Wil ie Mae said. “You never know what a man wil do when you try and quit him.”
“Uncle Raleigh is not going to do nothing to my mama.”
“This is not about your uncle, honey. It’s just about being grown. Just listen for anything that doesn’t sound right.”
I listened, but al I heard was the sounds of canning. I couldn’t make out their voices. I didn’t hear the click of the camera shutter, but I know that Raleigh took pictures; I’ve seen them. Close-ups of Mother’s face, eyes cast down. There is a photo of just her feet, the slender heels of her satin pumps sinking into the Alabama dirt. There is one of the palm of her hand covering the lens. The last in the series are six or seven of his own stricken face, his arms extended to hold the camera. These he must have taken once my mother had left him out there with the laundry, running to the kitchen and Wil ie Mae’s waiting arms.
“I told him,” she said.
“What did you say?” Wil ie Mae wanted to know.
“I told him that I couldn’t do it to Dana. That she needed her real father. He started saying, ‘Do you love me, Gwen? Do you love me, Gwen?’ I told him that this wasn’t the point, that it wasn’t a game.”
“Are you okay?” Wil ie Mae said.
“Yes,” my mother said. “It could have been worse. It could have been so much worse.”
I stood at the screen door staring out at the sheets. We had hung them out early in the morning, but here is was after noon and they were stil sopping wet. Under the house, puppies whined, waiting for Wil ie Mae’s mother to set out yesterday’s table scraps. The puppies were fluffy and pretty, but I wasn’t al owed to touch them, because they hadn’t had any shots.
I pushed open the screen door.
My mother said, “What are you doing?”
“I’m just looking at the puppies,” I said. “I won’t touch them.”
“Okay,” my mother said.
I opened the door and eased outside. As the screen door slammed against the frame, I ran to the clothesline. A wet sheet hit against my face as I pushed by it. I found Uncle Raleigh standing, staring up at the sky.
“Hey, Uncle Raleigh,” I said.
He didn’t answer.
“Are you mad at me?”
“Naw, Dana,” he said. “I could never be mad at you. You are a sweet girl.”
“Do you want to take my picture?”
He shook his head. “I am tired of taking pictures for now. I’l take your picture next time.” He sat down on the earth, which was wet with the drippings from the clothes. “Dana, I’ve had a very hard life,” he said, holding his arms out. “Come sit with me for a while.”
I remembered Wil ie Mae’s uncle, who had said the same thing. I shook my head. “I’m not al owed.”
“That’s fine,” he said, and I pushed through the wet curtain of sheet. “Tel her I’l be there in a minute,” he said. “Tel her I’m getting myself together.”
THE DRIVE FROM Opelika to Atlanta is about two hours if you take 1-85 straight down. Raleigh opted to take the surface streets, saying that he wanted to see the countryside. My mother argued at first, saying that she didn’t want to be three black people in a nice car roaming around the back streets of Dixie. Raleigh said any redneck passing by wouldn’t see three black people, they would see a white man, a black woman, and a little girl.
When we passed the sign to get on the interstate highway, he didn’t put on his turn signal and instead kept driving along the two-lane road. He slowed a bit at every intersection, giving my mother the chance to ask him to change course.
11
THE PRIZEWINNER
AS MY JUNIOR YEAR came to a close, and I started thinking about col ege applications, James assured me many times that Chaurisse was going to Spelman Col ege, right here in Atlanta. “She’s a stay-at-home girl,” he said. “Takes after her mama, just like you take after yours.” He spoke with conviction, without even a flutter of a stammer, but how could I trust his report? I, better than anyone, understood the limits of my father’s ability to predict the desires, actions, and motivations of a teenage girl. Besides, James had not been right since his mother died.
After Miss Bunny’s funeral, James spoke softly, ate less. He lost track of himself, leaving his hat on after he’d entered the house, cal ing my mother and me by the names of our rivals. How could we bring ourselves to be angry with him, pitiful as he was? The stubble growing on his chin was stiff and spiked with white. When he took off his jacket, I could see that he ironed only the col ar of his white shirt, leaving the rest rough-dried.
He had repaired his glasses with an unfolded paper clip.
My worried mother asked me to catch the school bus, so I would be at home within an hour of the final bel , so that someone would be at the apartment if my father were to drop by. She had beat me home one May afternoon and found him waiting on the back porch, cracking his knuckles until they were swol en and sore. When he stood up, the grime from the rusty chair left a butterfly across the seat of his good wool trousers.
“James needs us right now,” my mother said.
He didn’t show up very often, so I spent many afternoons alone in the apartment, reordering the keepsakes atop my chest of drawers, leafing through col ege brochures, and longing for Ronalda’s basement hideaway. When we passed each other between classes one Thursday, she pressed a skinny joint into my hand, folded over in a discarded sandwich bag. At home, I turned on the bathroom fan and pul ed open the thin paper, touching my tongue to the crease
, but getting high without Ronalda only made me paranoid and depressed.
When my father did come over on those early afternoons, he quizzed me about my only conversation with Miss Bunny.
“What did she say to you?”
“I already told you.”
“You didn’t tel me word for word.”
“I don’t remember word for word. Do you want me to get you an ashtray? Do you need a gin-and-tonic?”
“Would you get one for me?”
I set his gin-and-tonic on a coaster in front of him while he tamped his cigarette pack against his knee.
“How’s school?”
“Good.”
“Are you working on your col ege applications?”
“I’m just sending off to Mount Holyoke. That’s the only place I want to go. Okay?”
“I told you that you don’t have to worry about it. Mount Holyoke is expensive, but I am going to pay for it. Did you tel that to Miss Bunny?”
“How do you know Chaurisse isn’t applying to Mount Holyoke?”
“She’s not applying.”
“But how do you know?”
He took a swig of his drink. “She doesn’t like cold weather. Now answer my question about your grandmother. Did you tel her that I was going to pay for you to go to col ege?”
“She didn’t ask me.”
“You should have found a way to work it into conversation. What al did you say to her? I know I asked you before, but just run it al by me one last time.”
He worried so much about it that my mother started worrying, too, although I had given her the details as soon as I came home that evening. I had told her everything, after describing the shiny blue brooch that was to be my only inheritance. When I reported that James had told Miss Bunny that my mother was dead, she gasped as though she had been poked in a delicate place, and then she let go only a couple of tears before gathering herself together. It was not the first time that I had seen my mother cry, but the experience troubled me in the pit of myself.
“I ask for so little,” she said.
“I know, Mother.”
When she came to me three months later, inquiring again about the details of my conversation with Miss Bunny, I said, “I told you everything that there is to tel . You don’t want to go through it al again?”