by Tayari Jones
She laughed. “Why do people think that is the only problem a girl can have?”
“Are you?”
“I thought I was one time.”
“Me, too.”
“It was stupid because I’m on the Pil .”
“Me, too!”
“But nothing is foolproof.”
The coincidences were making me loopy. “I know!”
She smiled and moved her hand like she was going to touch me, but she didn’t.
“I have too many things on my mind. I’m applying to Mount Holyoke,” she said. “Early decision. Where are you going to col ege?”
“Don’t know yet.”
“Where are you applying?”
I shrugged. “A lot of places.”
“Mount Holyoke?”
“If it’s one of the sisters, I did, but Spelman is the only one I care about.”
“If you got in, would you go?”
“I guess,” I said. “But don’t change the subject. Tel me how come you’re here.”
She raised her eyebrows and pul ed her hand through her high ponytail. “Maybe I just wanted to be friends.”
I hated how she talked to me. I just want to be friends. People who real y wanted to be your friend didn’t say things like that. If they real y wanted to be your friend, they just did it. They just took your hand, listened to you talk.
“Don’t turn your face away from me,” she said. “I real y came over here to thank you for saving me in the store that time.” She gave a wobbly smile. “You can fix my hair for me if you want to.”
There was a knock on the floor. My mother, in the shop, was jabbing the ceiling with a broomstick.
“I got to get back downstairs,” I said. “I’m on the clock.”
“She pays you to work in the store?”
“Five dol ars an hour.”
“Are you close to your dad?”
I said, “More when I was little. It’s different now that I’m growing up.”
“Me, too,” she said with a bit of a sigh. She waved her hand to indicate her face and chest. “He can’t deal with it.”
I nodded. “I know what you mean. He can’t deal, and he doesn’t even know the half of it.”
“Exactly,” said Dana.
“I gotta get back downstairs,” I said. “You want a wash-and-set or not?”
“I want to see your room,” she said.
“Next time.”
She turned around the kitchen, pivoting on her left foot.
“Your kitchen isn’t anything special.”
“Who said it was?”
When we were leaving, I heard her brass bangles rattle as she slipped my father’s napkin into her fake Louis Vuitton.
We entered the shop through the back door. My mother was blow-drying the client I had shampooed. According to the big clock with shears as hands, we had only been gone fifteen minutes.
“Everybody come back to their senses?” Mama said.
“Yes, ma’am,” Dana said.
“Good,” Mama said to her with a kind smile. “Come back another day and we’l do you something pretty.”
“Tomorrow?” Dana asked.
“Not tomorrow,” my mama said. “I got plans.” She batted her eyes and al the customers laughed. “My husband is taking me to dinner, so I wil be trying to do something with my own hair.” Then she said to Dana, “Now don’t go cutting in your head before we see you again.”
“No, ma’am,” Dana said. She was like a different person now. At first I thought she was trying not to laugh, but now it seemed like she was trying not to cry.
“Show yourself out,” Mama said. “Chaurisse has work to do.”
I nodded and wrenched the top off of a large jar of basting oil. Dana stood at the doorway with her hand on the push bar, looking at us like she was about to go off to war. “Good-bye,” she said.
She couldn’t have been at the end of the driveway before everybody started talking about her.
“Something feels sad about that girl,” my mama said.
“I was about to say the same thing,” said the lady with the lap baby. “I wonder what kind of home she’s going back to.”
“There was a girl like that at my high school,” my mama said. “Had a baby for her daddy. She had that same beat-down way about her.”
“But such a pretty girl,” the old lady said. “And al that hair.”
“Pretty ain’t everything,” I said, surprising myself by speaking up.
“You jealous, Chaurisse?” my mama said.
“No. I’m just saying there could be more to her than just that. And she might have a good home. She could just be lonely. It’s a lot of people walking around that’s lonely.”
SINCE IT WAS a Wednesday night, Mama and I sat down to dinner by ourselves. My mother stood at the counter tossing a large salad. She was always watching what she ate. My mother was on a diet on the day I was born. On the bottom of my foot, there is a birthmark, several smal brown splotches arranged like a little constel ation. These are orange seeds, I am told. There was a rumor that pregnant ladies who consumed lots of vitamin C would lose their baby weight faster. It didn’t work. My mother grew two dress sizes after I was born, firmly lodging her at a size 18, which made her eligible to shop at the fat ladies’ store.
I went into the fridge and pul ed out two cans of Coke, diet for mama, regular for me.
“You want a glass, Mama?”
She said, “Can is al right for me.”
We sat at the table, across from each other, she at the nine, and me at the three. The twelve and the six are for Daddy and Uncle Raleigh, even if they aren’t here.
Mama squeezed a lemon over her salad while I layered mine with Green Goddess.
“There’s no point in eating salad if you’re going to do that.”
“I know,” I said.
She shook her head at me. “That girl this afternoon, she looks familiar. What was going on with her?”
“I don’t know.”
Mama said, “She nervouses me.”
“She’s al right,” I said. “I kind of like her.’
“She tel you what her problem is? She pregnant?”
“She was worried about going to col ege. That’s what she was talking about.”
“It’s good for her to be concerned about her education. I didn’t finger her for the type.”
“Can’t judge a book by its cover,” I said.
“What are you thinking about col ege?”
“What do you think about Mount Holyoke? That’s where Dana said she was going.”
“Never heard of it, but it can’t be any better than Spelman Col ege. That’s where I would have gone if things had turned out different.”
My mother finished her salad and looked into the bowl with a sort of empty dissatisfaction. She reached for a saltine cracker and ate it slowly.
She rubbed her eyes with the heels of her hands.
“Your daddy’l be home after while. What do you think he wants for dinner?” She got up and opened the freezer, and found four chicken legs. She set them in a bowl of warm water to thaw. “I should make enough for Raleigh, too.”
“Yeah,” I said. “Might as wel .”
16
THE REST, LIKE THEY SAY, IS HISTORY
WHEN I WAS JUST three months old, sick as a dog with colic, only Daddy could calm me down. I would wake up crying that high-pitched miserable cry and Daddy would get out of bed, go to my room, wrap me up in a couple blankets, and we might spend the rest of the night touring the back roads of DeKalb County in the Lincoln. It wasn’t just the fresh air that soothed me, though I stil like to drive with the windows open, even in winter. It was the going that I liked. Around that same time, Raleigh bought me a baby swing from Sears, Roebuck. He assembled the pink and yel ow contraption with a flathead screwdriver and an Al en wrench. Once it was upright and sturdy, Uncle Raleigh and Mama waited for me to start crying.
Being as I was a preemie, born al
most dead, I cried al the time. At the first whimper, Mama and Raleigh scooped me up, strapped me in, and started the swing to rocking. When the whimper switched over into something more in the category of a howl, Daddy was the one who rescued me, told them to give it up.
While he and I were cruising al over southwest Atlanta, down by Niskey Lake, even winding through the beautiful paths at West View Cemetery, Mama and Raleigh were taking the baby swing apart and fitting it back in the cardboard box. Al that back-and-forth did nothing for me. I needed forward motion and the quiet hum of a wel -tuned engine.
We kept up our motor excursions even after I stopped crying in the night. It’s il egal now to drive a car with a three-year-old in your lap, her little palms on the wheel, but this stil remains one of my fondest memories. I can stil remember stretching my hands to grip the steering wheel, Daddy saying, “There you go, Buttercup. There you go.” When I was twelve, it was time to take things to the next level.
Although the state wouldn’t al ow it until I was sixteen, I was ready to drive. Daddy took me for my first lessons at the Ford factory off 1-75. We went on Sundays, when the almost three thousand union workers were home sleeping in, leaving the massive parking lot almost empty.
“You know what?” he said to me on our way to my first lesson. “Driving is the most important thing you can know how to do. When I was a boy, I used to drive for white people, the same white people that my mama cleaned for. At first, when I was fifteen, sixteen, I used to wish I was the one riding in the backseat. I could picture myself walking out of the school building and there being a man in a hat, waiting to take me somewhere.”
“Where did you want to go?” I asked him.
“I didn’t even know for sure. I guess I imagined I would have the car carry me to Atlanta. Or just to a nice restaurant where I could sit down and eat something good, like steak and a glass of sweet tea. Maybe a baked potato. A country boy like me, that was al the finery I could imagine. Sour cream on the potato. I had never even tasted it before, but I always heard white folks asking for it or saying they didn’t want it.” He shrugged and smiled over at me. “You didn’t know your daddy could be so sil y, did you?”
I smiled back at him and tried to imagine him as a boy. I had seen a couple of his old school portraits, the black-and-white tone blurring into something gray and indistinct. JIMMY WITHERSPOON was written right below the col ar of his white shirt. When I stayed with Grandma Bunny for a month each summer, that picture was the first thing I saw when I opened my eyes, but I could never get my brain to accept that this Jimmy Witherspoon with the lazy eye and confident smile was my father.
“So the idea I had — to have my own driver one day — led me to thinking what kind of job I would need in order to have somebody to drive me.
My mama’s white people, they got their money because they owned the paper mil , and I knew I didn’t want to have nothing to do with the paper mil .
Just the smel alone was enough to run you away, no matter what the money was like. So I couldn’t think of nothing else, and it started making me depressed. Crazy as it was, I wanted to have a white man driving me around, to let him see what it feels like.” Daddy laughed. “My imagination was in overdrive. A black man having a chauffeur was crazy enough, but hiring a white man to drive? Absolutely insane. But this was my dream, and I didn’t tel nobody about it except Raleigh.”
“What did Uncle Raleigh say?
Daddy said, “You know how Raleigh is. He don’t like to argue. He just asked me if I was going to let my white driver use the front door or the back door when he showed up for work. I said I would go on and let him walk in the front. Then Raleigh asked me if maybe I could just use a real light-skinned black man to do the driving, that way it would look like I had a white driver, but I wouldn’t have to deal with al the problems that might come along with trying to boss a real white man. I laughed and told him that the only person in the world more uppity than an actual white man was a light-skinned nigger. I think that hurt his feelings, but I wasn’t talking about Raleigh. Your uncle is a special case, you know.”
I said I knew what he was talking about.
“Truth of the matter is that it was Raleigh who gave me the idea of starting my own business, but I don’t want to get ahead of myself. This here is a good story and I want to tel it properly.
“I used to drive these white people around al the time. Me and Raleigh used to take turns with the job, but the white people didn’t like Raleigh al that much. So I took on the driving ful time, and Raleigh had to go over to the mil . He stank so bad coming back home, but me and Laverne never said anything to him about it. Didn’t need to, I guess. He got a nose. We waited on him to wash up before we ate dinner, but you could stil smel the mil on him.
“One day, I was driving the white lady somewhere. She was al dressed up, hat, gloves, pink lipstick drawn where lips would have been if she had any. I just let her in, closed the door behind her and set off. No radio, no nothing, me and her just riding along listening to each other breathing.
Anyway, I was driving and I saw a sign up on the left for the highway. I seen that sign a hundred times, but this time I real y saw it, and it occurred to me that I could just twist my arms a little bit, turn the steering wheel and go wherever I wanted to. That lady in the backseat wouldn’t have no choice but to come along for the ride. I started laughing then, laughing hard. I liked to choke on so much laughing. I could see the lady in the backseat looking scared, like she was trapped in the car with a crazy nigger. Al I had to do was like this here” — he rotated the steering wheel to the left, changing lanes — “and me and her would have been on the highway headed toward Hilton Head. You get it, don’t you, Chaurisse?
“It takes a lot of trust to let somebody drive you around. People don’t think about it — you should see them just hopping into taxicabs downtown, not knowing who they got behind the wheel. That’s why I don’t get in no airplanes, neither. I was having al these thoughts while I was driving the car and laughing like a loon. The white lady looked like she was going to throw up. Then I stopped laughing and try to seem like I had some sense. Al the time my mind was just working.
“I couldn’t wait to tel it to Raleigh. He had just come home from the mil . I usual y gave him his space when he got home, and not just because of how he was smel ing but because he didn’t like to be around people until he got his constitution together. But I just had to tel him. He was walking up the steps to the front of the house and he didn’t even get the doorknob turned good before I busted out with it.
“I said, ‘I don’t ever want nobody driving me around. Whoever is doing the driving is real y the one in control.’
“Raleigh looked at me like, ‘You just now figuring that out?’ Your uncle is a very intel igent man. He’s like Albert Einstein and George Washington Carver rol ed up into one. Then he said, ‘Can we talk about this after I got my bath?’
“I said ‘Okay.’ Your mama was in the kitchen frying some fish. We had been married about two years, maybe three, and she was just final y at last learning how to cook. She almost kil ed me and Raleigh both with food poisoning. Did I ever tel you that story? It’s funny now, but it wasn’t funny at the time.
“I was just burning up with my new way of thinking. Raleigh was taking his sweet time washing up. He’s not like that now, but he used to be a pretty nigger when we was younger, rubbing baby oil on his arms to make the hair lie down. Stuff like that. So by the time he got his pretty self ready, I had already told it to your mama and she didn’t seem to be moved by what I had to say.
“Final y we sat down at the table to eat. Your mama was stil into religion back then, so we said grace and ‘Jesus Wept.’ Raleigh reached for a piece of fish, and I couldn’t hold back any longer.
“‘You didn’t tel me what you think of my idea.’
“Raleigh said, ‘What idea?’
“‘My idea that when you are driving the car, you are always the boss. Did you ever think of that?�
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“‘The boss is the one that pays you,’ Raleigh said.
“‘But every time they get in the car with me, they are putting their life in my hands.’
“‘That’s true,’ your mama said.”
Daddy laughed and hit his hand on steering wheel. “When we were young, your mama was ‘Yes, baby’ this, ‘Yes, baby’ that.” He laughed again.
“Those were some good days. We struggled, but those sure was some good days.
“Raleigh said, ‘The boss is the one who owns the car.’
“And just like that, it clicked: I needed to own myself a car and let people hire me to drive them around.
“I can’t say those other two were ready to hop on board. I mean, we al knew we wanted something else out of life. Your mama was doing white people’s laundry, didn’t have her high school diploma. Me and Raleigh had our diplomas, but neither one of us had the kind of job you could be proud of. It was, what? ’Sixty? ’Sixty-two? Something like that. We were young and ready to break out into the world. Raleigh had his eye on going to col ege. He didn’t know how he was going to get there, but he wanted it so bad, he was thinking about the army. I said, ‘Man, are you crazy?’ He lucky he didn’t get drafted. So I saved up some money, and Miss Bunny gave me what she had. Raleigh and Laverne gave me their pennies, too.
They both had other plans for their money, but I knew this was going to be the ticket. If things went the way I needed them to go, there would be money later for beauty school and col ege. I bought the first car. That Plymouth. It wasn’t nice like this here Lincoln, but I kept it clean and even crammed a little flavored pil ow under the seat. Your mama stuffed it with cinnamon sticks and other nice-smel ing things; she even sewed some embroidery on it.
“I started driving colored people around, not the wel -off folks, because who would pay money to hire a car that wasn’t as good as the one you have in your driveway? People hired me especial y on occasions like funerals, weddings, things like that. After a couple years, I gave your mama and Miss Bunny their money back. I told Raleigh I was prepared to return his investment — I had it for him in a brown envelope, looked al official and everything. I said, ‘Raleigh, here you go, every penny back, with interest. I got it for you right here, or we can make a deal, a partnership, save up for another car and go into business together. Fifty-fifty.’