Silver Sparrow

by Tayari Jones

  THE MORNING AFTER Miss Sparks told her she was wasted, and the day before her Easter dress turned into a wedding gown, Mama got up at 7

  a.m. and ironed herself a blue blouse with a Peter Pan col ar. She was boiling a pan of water for her bath when Mattie stumbled into the kitchen, sleepy-eyed and hungover.

  “What you doing, Laverne?”

  “Getting ready for school.”

  Mattie held my mama’s arm. “They didn’t tel you? You can’t go to school no more.”

  “Oh,” Mama said. “Oh,” she said again, hanging the white-col ared blouse in her closet and turning down the fire under the pan of bathwater.

  Mama let her Murphy bed out, dressed it with heavy blankets despite the heat, and lay down. When her mother left to pick up the white people’s laundry, Mama opened her eyes. “What a waste.” She said it over and over.

  The Henry County judge wouldn’t do it, even though Mattie kept saying, “She’s pregnant!” Mama cringed each time her mother pronounced the terrible word, which an emphasis on the first syl able. “She’s preg nant!” The judge leaned over his disorderly desk and spoke to my mama.

  “Are you pregnant?”

  Mama looked to Daddy, who wore the clothes he wore to sing in the youth choir. Fresh white shirt and blue pants ironed with too much starch.

  Behind his glasses, Daddy looked, in turn, to Grandma Bunny. She was there, not in her Sunday best, but in a good dress, the same green of unripe tomatoes. Mama let her eyes fol ow Daddy’s and waited for him to look back at her, but he didn’t. After searching his mother’s face, he turned to Uncle Raleigh, who just tugged his shirtsleeves so that they would cover his bony wrists.

  “Young lady,” the judge said.

  “Sir,” she said quietly.

  “Are you pregnant?”

  “Oh,” Mama said.

  Daddy spoke up. “I p-p-plan to own up to m-m-my responsibilities, sir.” He looked again at Grandma Bunny, who gave him a smal but generous smile. Mama wondered how it must feel for someone to be proud of you like that.

  “Son, nobody is addressing you. Young lady . . .” he said again.

  “I don’t know,” Mama said, hoping to stop him before he said that awful word again.

  “You know,” Mattie said.

  The judge leaned over his desk a little more. He had a reputation for being a decent white man, much better than the rest. Mattie’s cousin kept house for his family for thirty-some years and nobody ever laid a hand on her.

  “You want to get married, gal? You want to be a wife to this boy?”

  “I don’t know,” Mama said again, looking now into the judge’s face.

  He settled back in his chair and fiddled with the tiny stone animals resting on his desk. He polished a quartz rabbit on his shirtfront before speaking. “I won’t do it. I can’t give you a license.”

  Mattie said, “What do you mean you can’t? I’m her mother. There’s his mother. We give our permission.”

  The judge shook his head. “The girl is not giving consent.”

  “But she’s pregnant,” Mattie Lee said. “What would you do for your own child?”

  “I can’t do it,” the judge said.

  “We’l just go to Cobb County, then,” Mattie Lee said.

  “You’l just have to.” The judge looked up at the wal clock.

  “You can do it tomorrow. Today is done with.”

  ON THE SECOND attempt, only Daddy dressed up. Mama wore the blouse she’d ironed on the day she found out she couldn’t go back to school.

  Grandma Bunny was absent, as she couldn’t get a second day off from her job, but the white folks did lend the car, a Packard, which Daddy drove the twenty miles to Cobb County. They left early, as Marietta, Georgia, was not a good place to be colored after sundown; it was so racist that they had even lynched Jewish people.

  Mattie sat up front with Daddy, with one hand on the dashboard to hold herself steady. In the backseat, Mama leaned herself against the door and Uncle Raleigh stretched his long pale arm over to touch her sleeve.

  The second judge sold them the license without asking any questions of Mama or Daddy. He did look crooked at Uncle Raleigh. “You colored, son?”

  “Yes, sir,” Uncle Raleigh said.

  “Just checking,” the judge said, turning his face back toward the marriage license and signing his name in wet ink. Having done that, he held the document out in Daddy’s direction, but Mattie plucked it out of his hands and snapped it into her A-frame pocketbook, clenched tight in the crook of her arm.

  Taking my mama by the sleeve of the school blouse, she steered her toward the door. “Let’s go, let’s go, let’s go.”

  Mama stumbled after her, while Daddy and Uncle Raleigh fol owed behind, close as brothers and separate from the urgency of women.

  THE BOYS LIVED like wild animals. This is what people said. Grandma Bunny was raising James by herself since his father got himself kil ed in a paper-mil accident. About that same time, Grandma Bunny took in Uncle Raleigh after his real mama, a redbone girl, ran off to have a better life for herself. Although she was light herself, she couldn’t stand the look of him, that’s what people said.

  Grandma Bunny was a kindhearted woman, generous to orphans, mangy kittens, and other strays. Generations of cats lived under her house, fed on table scraps. Years later, when Grandma Bunny didn’t have anyone to look after but herself, she bought kibble to mix in with the leftover oatmeal.

  AFTER THE WEDDING, if you could cal it that, although Mama didn’t — she wil go to her grave feeling that she had spent almost her whole life as a wife, without ever having been a bride — she went to her new home. Mama was alone in the house, while Daddy and Uncle Raleigh returned the white people’s car. She peeked into the kitchen and found it to be much like the one in her mother’s house, porcelain sink showing black where it was chipped, gas stove with two eyes, ice box. The bathroom looked about the same, too. Mama turned the knob on the left side of the sink and smiled when warm water gushed over her hand. At least there would be no heating up water just for a bath. Then she stopped grinning. She had never been naked in any home other than her own. Not even on the night that everything happened had she removed al her clothes. Lord, she wondered. What had she done? What had she gotten herself into?

  Leaving the bathroom, she tiptoed into a bedroom that smel ed of talcum powder. She figured that room for Grandma Bunny’s. A large white Bible with gold-edged pages sat on a smal night table. In a framed photograph, a man leaned up against an old car. Mama didn’t linger over it, as her mother had a similar photo in her own bedroom; that one was a photo of Mama’s father, and Mama assumed that this was James Senior. She envied his pose, leaning against the fender, head cocked, slanted smile. To Mama, this was the stance of a somebody who was never coming back.

  Lastly, she entered the room that was to be James’s and her own. The bed was so large that it embarrassed her. The bedspread was too narrow, not covering the sides of the mattresses. This was where she was to sleep at night, in her nightgown, just that thin covering of cotton. Here she would sleep next to James Witherspoon, a boy she hardly knew who was now her husband. What a word, husband. It didn’t sound like it should have anything to do with her. Inspecting the bed more closely, she saw that this one large bed, the marriage bed, was actual y a pair of singles pressed together. Looking around she figured out that this was the room that the boys shared. She had been so distracted by the bed, its sheer size, and insinuation, that she didn’t see the clues that this was not a space a girl was meant to enter. It smel ed faintly of boy: sweat, fried chicken, and freshcut grass. Mama went to the dint in the center of the bed and pushed until there was a gap between the mattresses. There was only one blanket, and she smoothed it over the bed that she decided would be Daddy’s.

  The boys. This is how she thought of them. She stil cal s them that, to this day. In the years that came after, she could think of Daddy as a man, and Uncle Raleigh as wel , but she would alw
ays see the two of them as the boys they were when they returned from the long walk home after returning the car.

  Daddy and Uncle Raleigh — “Salt and Pepper,” some people cal ed them, because of their coloring — were both hot and filthy. The crisp shirts they had worn to see the judge were damp now and musty. They fidgeted on their own front porch and rang the bel .

  Mama opened the door for them. “Come on in,” she said, like this was her house and not theirs, as though she were the lady of this house, as though she were a lady at al . “Y’al want some water?”

  Daddy said, “Yeah.” And Uncle Raleigh said, “Yes’m.” This was funny somehow, and the three of them laughed.

  “Y’al hungry?”

  “Yeah,” Daddy said. “Can you cook?”

  Mama shrugged. “Depends on what you want to eat.”

  “I’m not hungry,” Uncle Raleigh said.

  “Y’al had something to eat over the white people’s place?” Daddy said, “No, we didn’t eat n-n-nothing over there. M-m-mama sent us back here and said we needed to eat at home. She said we needed to get into a routine, with us coming home at a certain time, and you learning how to get the food ready and everything.”

  “Oh,” Mama said.

  Daddy went on, “And she said that I am supposed to show you where she keeps the starch and everything for the washing.”

  “I know how to do laundry already,” Mama said.

  “You don’t have to wash none of my clothes,” Uncle Raleigh said. “Miss Bunny says she’l keep doing my things same as always. You just have to take care of James because you’re his wife now.” Uncle Raleigh said this last part in a quiet voice that sounded almost ashamed.

  Mama looked up at Daddy, who shrugged. “It’s going to be okay. Once everybody gets used to everything. There’s chicken in the icebox. Mama cut it up already. You just have to fry it. It’l be easy. And she said to tel you that you are welcome here.”

  “Y’al two are going to keep going to school?”

  They looked at each other, confused-seeming. “Yeah.”

  “I can’t go no more,” Mama said quietly.

  “Because you’re married?” Uncle Raleigh said.

  “No,” James said. “Because she’s p-p-p . . .”

  The word seemed to stick in his mouth. Mama had braced herself for it, but it was taking too long to be born.

  “Pregnant,” she said, finishing his sentence before spinning herself around and walking toward the kitchen.

  This house seemed unsteady to her; the little blue cups in the china cabinet tinkled with her steps. She felt the eyes of the boys on her back as she made her way. It reminded her of the last time she had been here, when she came with her cousin Diane, who was not pregnant, who didn’t even like Uncle Raleigh anymore. The house seemed different now, brighter. The days had been much shorter then; by 6 p.m. it was dark out and she could hardly see Daddy’s face. He didn’t stammer at al when asking her if she had ever kissed a boy. She said yes, although she hadn’t. He asked her if she had done “anything else,” and she nodded. And now she wondered why she had bobbed her head in that lie. He had seemed older then than he did now, three months later. Then he hadn’t been parroting what al his mother had told him to do, what she had planned for him to eat.

  On that earlier day, it had seemed like he and Uncle Raleigh were the men of this house, that they lived here by themselves.

  Mama recal ed the black hairs sprouting from Uncle Raleigh’s Adam’s apple as he had stirred liquor into the concoction in Grandma Bunny’s punch bowl. The little glass cups hooked around the sides of the crystal bowl tapped against each other with a noise like holiday bel s. It was a dignified object, this punch bowl, the sort of thing that Miss Sparks liked to talk about when she was teaching table manners. According to Miss Sparks, this was how you could tel the difference between crystal and regular glass. Mama had insisted on drinking her punch in the proper dainty-handled cup, laughed, and asked for more. The punch was somehow sweet and hot at the same time.

  As he refil ed her cup, she decided that she would have liked Raleigh, had her cousin not already claimed him for herself. She liked the way he always asked everybody how they were doing.

  “How are you feeling?” he said to Laverne for no reason at al .

  By this time, Daddy was sitting close to her and fondling her hair. She enjoyed the feel of his breath on her neck and even the sweet liquory smel .

  He placed a tingly kiss on the very spot under her hair that he’d been warming with his breath. “Is that fine?” he asked her.

  She nodded, feeling wonderful and wanting more punch. She held out her cup, but Daddy took it away from her and put it on a cherry wood end table. “Don’t drink too much,” he said.

  “You don’t want to get sick.”

  “Okay,” she said, obedient as a child.

  “Do you want to see my room?” Daddy asked her.

  “Okay,” she said again as he took her hand and pul ed her to her feet.

  Her cousin Diane, leaning against Uncle Raleigh’s shoulder, said, “Don’t do anything I wouldn’t do.”

  The idea of this made Mama’s head whirl. Diane was three years older and the possibilities seemed endless. She laughed again.

  “James,” Diane said, “take it easy with her. She’s just fourteen and she’s not used to drinking.”

  “Fifteen,” Mama said, remembering the lie she’d told earlier in the afternoon. “Fifteen, remember?”

  Uncle Raleigh said, “James knows how to act. Don’t worry.”

  Diane put her hands on Uncle Raleigh’s head. “You know you got some good hair,” she said.

  Mama pul ed on Daddy’s arm and he led her to the bedroom. “Let’s give the lovebirds some privacy.”

  It was a setup, a plan between the boys. They hadn’t meant to change her life forever, to make a baby and provoke a premature marriage. It was just about the boys hoping to “get a little trim.” These were Daddy’s words to her, later that night after they’d eaten the dinner she’d ruined, chicken burnt at the skin, bloody at the bone. Daddy told her this that night, as they lay in the single beds, each on the other side of the gap. Mama slept in the clothes she’d gotten married in, her school blouse and skirt. She removed her shoes, but not her socks, and climbed into the bed. Daddy, she assumed was in his shorts and shirtless, but she didn’t know for sure because she had turned her face away when he emerged from the bathroom.

  She didn’t face him until he was under the covers, less than a foot away from her. His body smel ed of strong soap and his breath carried the odor of baking soda.

  “When is Miss Bunny coming back home?” Mama wanted to know. She was unsure what to think about this woman, Miss Bunny, whose instructions had led to the fiasco that was dinner and had caused her to spend what was left of the evening washing James’s school shirts with lye soap and cranking the water out before hanging them on the line in her backyard while stray cats brushed against her legs. Her hands were stil tender and she rubbed them together, concentrating on the throbbing.

  “It’s natural if you don’t want to sleep in the bed with me right away,” Daddy said. God bless Miss Bunny for words to her son, letting him know not to expect too much from his young wife. Her own mother had urged her not to be shy. “You don’t want him to change his mind. Then where wil you be?” Mattie Lee had said. “I’m not raising a baby for you, Laverne. I’m too old to start over.”

  “James,” Mama said, “did you know that this is what was going to happen?”

  He didn’t say anything. He only breathed deeply with his eyes closed. Mama studied his face, which was softer-looking without his glasses. She observed the dip in his upper lip and the heat rash that stretched across his forehead. “Did you know?”

  “Let me cut off the light,” he said.

  Daddy threw the covers off himself and knelt in the center of his bed, reaching upward for the frayed string connected to the yolk of light suspended from the ceil
ing. He was shirtless and under his arms grew patches of nappy hair; his chest was smooth as a crystal bal . He jerked the cord, kil ed the light. She could make out the shape of him as he settled himself back into bed.

  “It wasn’t supposed to be you. Your cousin Diane, she met R-r-raleigh at the picture show a day, maybe two days, before . . . you know, what al happened. She said she liked him and he asked her to come over to the house. She said that she didn’t want to come by herself and Uncle Raleigh said that was just fine because he wanted her to bring a friend for me to meet. And Diane said she had a cousin here who was sixteen, same age as her. She didn’t say your name. If she had said your name I w-would have said no way because you were too young to be sp-sp-spending time with us in that way.”

  Mama said, “But when I showed up, you knew it was me.”

  Daddy said, “I didn’t mean for nothing to happen. We were al having a good time and you didn’t seem scared or anything and everybody was just having a good time. You re-m-m-member, you were having a good time, weren’t you?”

  Mama remembered that day and she did have a good time. She couldn’t forget the tinkle of the crystal cups against the crystal punch bowl and the sweet hot taste of the liquor. It had been fun. She could admit that much to herself, but not to Daddy. She knew that something wrong had been done unto her, that she was more sinned against than sinning and she wouldn’t say that she had enjoyed herself, because that was al part of the trick, wasn’t it? “I was too scared,” she said.

  “You didn’t seem scared. You were asking me for more punch, remember? And I didn’t let you have it because I didn’t want you to get sick. I was trying to look out for you.”

  Mama whispered her next statement. She said it quietly, as it was a word more shameful than the one everyone kept saying, pregnant. This was a worse word than that, but she had to say it because it was a word that had been squirming in her throat since she found out that she couldn’t go back to school. “James, was I raped?”