by Tayari Jones
She said, “When you told me before, I was distracted by the shock of it. I just want to know, now, for the sake of information. You father is tied up in knots and I am just trying to understand why.”
“I don’t know what he wants me to say. He asks me every time, and I don’t know what I am supposed to say.”
Mother sat down and took off her nursing shoes. “This is so peculiar.” In the kitchen, she fil ed a basin with warm water, adding a scoop of Epsom salts and a squirt of soap before putting it down in front of the couch, letting the sudsy water slosh onto the carpet. She slid her feet into the basin.
“My guess, Dana, is that she said something to him. People say al sorts of things on their deathbeds. At the very end, they just disappear inside themselves, but a couple of days before, they speak from the heart. She must have said something about us.” My mother smiled and touched my shoulder. “Whatever you did, you must have represented us wel .” She wiggled her feet in the basin, soaking the carpet again. “Keep your fingers crossed. Sometimes change is good.”
Ronalda wasn’t worried about col ege applications. She had already made the decision to go to Southern University in Baton Rouge. She had long admired the school’s marching band and hoped to be chosen as a Dancing Dol . I showed her the brochures from Mount Holyoke and the computer-generated letter that urged me to apply.
“Look how nice it is,” I said.
“Are you sure you want to live up there with al those white people?” Ronalda asked.
“It’s a good school,” I said.
“Yeah,” she said. “But living here, you don’t know anything about white people. Where I’m from, everything is mixed. In Atlanta, at least out here where we stay at, everything is so black that y’al don’t know what it feels like to be black.”
“That doesn’t make sense,” I said.
“You’l see,” she said. “You get out to Holyoke with those white people and you wil see exactly what I mean.”
“Al I’m worried about,” I told her, “is that Chaurisse wil pop up and say she is going to Mount Holyoke. It wil be the same as Six Flags, but worse.”
“I stil can’t believe that,” Ronalda clucked.
“I can’t believe it either,” I said. “You would think I would be used to his shit.”
But I wasn’t. Six Flags Over Georgia provided the most attractive summer employment for a teenager in Atlanta. Ronalda and I had planned to apply together, but she ended up making better money taking care of her little brother. After three interviews, I was offered the chance to spin cotton candy onto paper cones for a nickel over minimum wage. My first choice would have been patrol ing the park, posing families for photos. Stil , I was happy enough with the cotton-candy position; it would good practice in meeting people, and the money would come in handy, too. To fit in at Mount Holyoke, I would need Ivy League clothes, skirts and blazers. My mother liked the idea of me working, saying, “If you are going to try and get a hardship scholarship, you need some proof that you have held down a job before or else they wil think you are just looking for a handout.”
I hadn’t even reported to HR to get my red-and-blue uniform and pin-on name tag when James arrived at Continental Colony bearing gifts. “I brought you a little something,” he said, and I knew the news wasn’t good.
He explained that Chaurisse, too, had applied for work at Six Flags. She would be strapping guests into a parachute ride cal ed the Great Gasp.
I looked at my mother, who was busy fil ing two glasses with ice. Her face didn’t flicker with anger, she just looked tired. I bit down hard on my lip.
How could I not have anticipated this? Of course Chaurisse wanted to work at Six Flags. Everyone did. And of course she would get the job. She got everything.
“I’m sorry, Dana. I didn’t know until now.” James extended an orange paper sack in my direction, but I didn’t reach for it.
“Take it,” he said, pul ing an album from the bag. Michael Jackson was wearing a white suit and cuddling a pair of tiger cubs. “I got it at Turtles.
Don’t you col ect stamps from there?” James nudged me with the corner of the cardboard album jacket.
I crossed my arms over my chest. “I don’t listen to albums. I like cassettes.”
“It’s n-n-new,” he said.
“I got the job first,” I said. “I’ve even been fitted for a uniform.”
“Things happen,” James said. “Things happen. What do you want me to do?”
I knew what I wanted him to do, but I also knew it could never happen.
My mother breezed in from the kitchen and handed James his gin-and-tonic. She handed me a glass of orange juice.
“So how wil Dana spend the summer? I prefer something educational. Maybe you could come up with a smal stipend for her. She was counting on having pocket change this summer.” My mother was calm. This must be how she talks to patients who refuse to take their medicine. She lets them know they don’t have a choice by speaking very quickly and pronouncing al her consonants.
By the time my father left, it was determined that I would be given twenty-five dol ars a week, fifteen of which would go into my savings account and the rest into my pocket. I would also be given a summer membership to a correspondence course to help students score high on the SAT. My mother was satisfied; my father thought he had gotten off cheap; and I was stil furious.
I passed the rest of June and most of July figuring out how to make educated guesses on multiple-choice questions when I had no idea what the answer was. This strategy was different from the one you were supposed to employ when you could at least rule out one of the options. It was not just a guessing game; it felt more like a kind of specialized lying. Raleigh came by on Thursdays to play cards with my mother, and he would quiz me on my vocabulary words. He photographed me memorizing a dictionary page. Years later, he sold that shot to the United Negro Col ege Fund, along with a photo of Ronalda reading The Color Purple while balancing her little brother on her hip and at the same time flipping a gril ed cheese.
It was not the best summer of my life, but it was manageable, until my mother was attacked at the mailboxes in the front of our apartment complex. The holdup man stole the mail and her handbag. Even worse, he pul ed out a leather-handled knife and helped himself to a hank of her hair. The bald spot, just above her left ear, was about the size of a Kennedy fifty-cent piece. She easily covered it with al the shiny hair she had left, but her fingers worried the spot, making her seem nervous and old.
“The neighborhood is going down,” she said. “Seventeen years ago, these were nice apartments. I was never worried about checking my mailbox. I used to walk around at two, three o’clock in the morning.”
“I know, Mother.”
“I hope you meet a good man when you go to Mount Holyoke. I am not saying that you need to find a Rockefel er or a footbal star. Just someone who wil understand that you have obligations, who won’t mind helping out a bit. I can’t live here by myself.”
When my mother’s hair was stolen, I had been watching The Cosby Show while sipping from a can of grape soda. She opened the door calmly, locked it behind her, and walked to the couch, where I fanned myself with a magazine. She fel to her knees, took the magazine away, and guided my fingers through her hair.
“Can’t James help us find another place?” I asked her.
“Your father has promised to sponsor your education,” she said. “That’s the best he can do. Bigamy is expensive.”
I expected her to reward her own joke with a dry, angry laugh, but she just held her hand over my own, pressing my fingertips onto the nubby patch.
“Don’t forget me,” she said as I rocked her on my lap, awash in a briny mix of guilt and gratitude.
BUT IN THE weeks fol owing, I grew tired of her unhappiness, the impossible weight of it.
“It wil grow back,” I said. I grabbed a handful of my own hair, so much like hers, and said, “I would give you some of mine if I could.”
; “Don’t try and act like you don’t understand what’s going on here,” she said.
I spent as much time as I could away from the apartment. I was sick of my mother’s compulsive tidiness, as though we were always expecting guests. I wanted to live in a house with wal s painted in various shades of blue and green, instead of the eggshel hue that screamed renter. I used some of my summer stipend to buy a MARTA pass, so I could have unlimited access to the 66 Lynhurst. Marcus was home, but packing as he prepared to move to Chapel Hil . Ruth Nicole Elizabeth was stil his girlfriend, but he and I spent time together in the mornings; by lunch we were done and I walked across the street to Ronalda’s.
When I needed her to, she smoothed hickeys from my neck and chest. Cal ing Marcus “Count Chockula,” she careful y pressed the blemish with the teeth of her comb, dispersing the blood gathered under my skin. When she’d done al she could, I covered the marks with foundation and said,
“Want to play on the phone?”
I kept Laverne’s business card in my purse, even though Ronalda and I had both memorized the number; the shiny finish had broken down with the oil of my dirty hands. The card was from the stack my mother hid in the kitchen, behind the flour canister. I liked the logo — a languid fox lazing across the letters. MRS. LAVERNE WITHERSPOON, PROPRIETRESS. “Playing on the phone” meant that we would cal the Pink Fox pretending to be potential customers. Ronalda asked how much for a press-and-curl. Chaurisse, at least we thought it was her, said twenty-eight dol ars with a cut.
Ronalda said thank you and hung up. “Too rich for my blood,” she said. I cal ed once from school. “I want to know how much it is to get a Jheri curl?”
This time, I was pretty sure I was talking to Laverne. “That depends. Would you like to come in for a consultation?”
Ronalda unplugged the telephone from her parents’ room, took it down to the basement, and plugged it into the empty jack in her stepmother’s study. We got in the habit of cal ing several times a week, disguising our voices and asking about elaborate services. “How much is it to just get a press without a curl?” “What is the cost of relaxer on virgin hair?” “What about finger waves?” “Do you take walk-ins?”
“That’s what we should do,” Ronalda said. “We should just walk in one day.”
“No,” I told her. “No way. If I were to get caught over there, that would be the end of my family.”
Halfway through that miserable summer, Raleigh won a local contest for photography that earned him a four-hundred-dol ar prize; the winning photo, taken in the days after Miss Bunny’s death, was displayed in Greenbriar Mal for sixty days. The photo focused on Laverne as she was preparing herself to give Miss Bunny her very last hairdo. In the image, Laverne is slackfaced with sorrow while the straightening comb steams on the undertaker’s hot plate. In the background is Chaurisse, wearing a plastic apron and looking over her shoulder to where Miss Bunny lies, out of the frame, lifeless and not yet adorned. My mother visited the prizewinning photo, standing close enough that her breath mottled the glass.
“There is something beautiful about that,” she said. “Laverne is not my favorite person, but nobody can say that she didn’t do her duty.”
I also looked at the photograph, but my attention was on my sister. She was getting prettier as we grew older. Her features seemed to be settling into her face.
“What would happen to me if you were to die?” I asked my mother.
“You’re almost eighteen. You don’t need to worry about it.”
“But what if you were to die tomorrow?”
“I won’t die tomorrow.”
My mother and I bought ice-cream cones from Baskin Robbins and ate them as we watched people take in the image. The caption read only going to glory, so people didn’t know what to make of it. “I can’t believe they gave him four hundred dol ars for that” was a common response. Some other people took a moment to just stare in silence and then went away disquieted.
“This is probably not the best idea,” I said to my mother.
She smiled a very bright smile. “Are you reading my mind?”
I smiled back, pleased with our connection. I stood up to leave and she fol owed suit, dumping the rest of her ice cream into the trash can. She approached the prizewinner, hanging on the wal in between the eye doctor and the rent-to-own place. Because she stood so close, her reflection layered over the images in the frame.
“Mother,” I said, “I thought we were leaving.”
“These people are not better than us,” my mother said, through clenched teeth. “We have everything that they have. I work hard every day. I have my associate’s degree. She’s only been to beauty school. And you are a better daughter. We are better people.”
She was so near the photo now that her lipstick marked the glass.
“Come on,” I said, taking her by her arm. “Let’s just go.”
“You’re fine, aren’t you, Dana? You feel okay about your childhood, right?”
“Yeah,” I said. “I’m okay.”
“Because you know that a lot of black children never know their fathers.”
“Chaurisse doesn’t know her father,” I said, trying to make her laugh.
My mother looked to the left and then to the right, like she was about to cross the street. Then she took the frame by its edges and lifted it upward until the wire on the back disconnected from the hanger. She tucked the portrait under her arm like she had paid for it.
“Let’s go,” she said.
“Mother, you have to put that back.”
“I don’t have to do anything,” she said, striding for the door, looking determined and weirdly professional.
I jogged to catch up with her and reached for the frame, but she swept it from my reach. She made it through the double doors and into the back parking lot. She was running now, laughing like she had just stolen the Mona Lisa. Mother outpaced me, partly because my jel ies, a half size too smal , cut into my heels with every step, but partly because she was on fire with something I couldn’t feel. The wind pul ed her hair up as she ran, exposing the blank space.
“Mother,” I cal ed after her, “please slow down.”
“I can’t,” she cal ed over her shoulder. “I just can’t.”
PART II
Bunny Chaurisse Witherspoon
12
A PECULIAR START
MY FAMILY STORY STARTS in Ackland, Georgia, in 1958, when my mother, Laverne Witherspoon, was fourteen years old.
She had worn her Easter dress, lilac cotton with pressed pleats. At the time, this dress was her greatest achievement. Even in church, when the preacher led everyone in prayer, she found her attention pul ed away by her beautiful sleeves and careful embroidery. Now it was to be her wedding gown. For a moment, Mama thought that maybe this was her punishment for thinking too much of herself, for spending too much money on the slick nylon lining. When Mama had twirled on Easter Sunday before church, her mother said, “You look like a bride.”
Now, my Grandmamma Mattie pul ed the used-to-be Easter dress from the chifforobe and tossed it on the bed where my mama lay, stil as a cadaver. “Come on, Laverne,” Mattie said. “The boy says he’s going to marry you.”
My mama stil didn’t move. Mattie pul ed the covers back and found my mama naked except for her panties, ashy except for her tear-shiny face, and skinny except for her bulging already stomach. Mattie made a couple of idle threats and even tried talking sweet, the way a mother is supposed to, but final y she set about dressing Mama the way you change the sheet out from under an invalid.
“You need to be out in the streets rejoicing, instead of making believe you’re dead.” Mattie jerked the bodice up over my mama’s hips. Mama whimpered at the sound of the careful seams giving way, but she didn’t help or resist as Mattie propped her into a sitting position. “What kind of mother are you going to be? You can’t be stupid and be a decent mama.”
My mama was so stunned, she couldn’t speak. She didn’t hardly eve
n know my daddy yet. Like everybody else in town, she recognized him by his thick and square glasses, ugly as army issue. She knew his name and what church he and his mother went to. His father was long dead and his mama was a live-in for white people, so she left Daddy and Uncle Raleigh alone in the house six days out of the week. This is what everybody knew about my daddy.
This mess came as a consequence of her cousin Diane fal ing in love with Uncle Raleigh. Love is what Diane cal ed it, but Mama knew this to be a basic case of color-struckness. Daddy and Uncle Raleigh were just juniors in high school, but Diane was a senior and was starting to look for a husband, one that she could make some pretty babies with. Mama had gone in the first place only because Diane didn’t want to go to the boys’
famously unsupervised home by herself, leaving people plenty of room to speculate. So Mama went along with her cousin after school, and when her cousin disappeared with Uncle Raleigh, Mama was by herself with Daddy. This whole situation was just a matter of who was sitting next to who, when. Next thing Mama knew, there was a baby growing inside her and there was nothing that anyone could do about it. At fourteen, my mama couldn’t believe that the events of one clumsy evening had led to this. She hadn’t even known it was possible.
When Mama stopped being able to hold down her lunch, she was worried, but it was the burnt-penny taste in the back of her mouth that sent her to see Miss Sparks. From eight until noon, Miss Sparks served in the capacity of school nurse, but Mama liked her best as the home ec teacher who praised her sewing. Miss Sparks was known for her high-pitched voice that sounded almost like opera when she scolded rowdy students with her trademark refrain: “Negro people! Remember your dignity.” Miss Sparks’s gentle reminder could break up a fistfight between boys or a squabble between girls. Once, when a silver bracelet had gone missing, a word from Miss Sparks had inspired the thief to return it, newly polished and wrapped in a sheet of tissue.
Mama told her mother everything Miss Sparks had said about her condition, but she didn’t share the home ec teacher’s parting words: “What a waste.” This is what Mama was thinking of while Mattie dressed her; this was the memory that froze her in her place, aggravating Mattie so bad that she slapped my Mama’s mouth for having the nerve to cry.