by Shutta Crum
Suddenly, I could move. I got the ice. I ran to get napkins and Mama’s serving tray.
Finally, I stood still and looked up at him, able to speak again. “I’m sorry I bothered you; that you came all this way for nothing. You’re not my daddy.”
“Don’t be sorry,” he said. “I didn’t come ‘for nothing.’ You’re a brave girl, with one of the best mothers in the world. I had to come and meet you. I didn’t want to send a letter—I was afraid Mirabelle would see it.”
Somehow I hadn’t thought of that!
“So,” he continued, “forgive me for surprising you.” Then he did a wonderful thing. He took my hand, raised it, and kissed it, just like I’d seen gentlemen do on TV. “I’ve known your mother a long time and I’ve been waiting, it seems like forever, to make your acquaintance, Miss Jessica Kay Bovey. Even though I’m not your father, may I be your friend?”
“Yes,” I whispered.
“Well, then,” he said. He gave my chin a little shake with his hand as though he was trying to help me shake out any more tears that were threatening. “I think we better get back into the living room before your mother wonders what’s going on.”
“Yes.” I nodded, took the tray, and led the way with my new friend.
In the living room Mama had tidied up a bit and was sitting at one end of the couch. I started to put the tray on the coffee table as Dr. Harrison bent to sit at the other end of the couch. I saw a little face peeking out from the cushions. “Mr. Perkins!” I yelled.
He stopped in mid-sit. “Mr. Perkins?”
“Between the cushions.”
Dr. Harrison looked down and laughed. Before I could put the tray safely down and get Mr. Perkins, Dr. Harrison had rescued him from the couch.
“Jessie can—” Mama started to say.
“I don’t mind,” he said. He had Mr. Perkins cupped gently in his hands. “He’s a great big specimen: Bufo americanus, American toad.”
“Most people don’t like toads,” I said.
“I do,” he said.
“You do?”
“Sure. I had all kinds of pets when I was a kid. I had toads, frogs, snakes—whatever I could catch or could entice to follow me home. I don’t think my mother always appreciated it. If I hadn’t become a doctor, I would have gone into veterinary science. Did you know that some toads like to have their backs scratched?”
“Mr. Perkins likes to be scratched right there!” I pointed to the spot.
Dr. Harrison sat down, put Mr. Perkins in his lap, and scratched him. “Oh, he does like that. Toads are interesting creatures, much more interesting than frogs, I think. They can actually be trained to come when you call them by name.”
“They can?” I asked.
“Yes. And they live a lot longer than frogs, generally. In fact, I remember reading about one case of a toad that lived for thirty-four years under the porch of a house in England. He came out in the evening when called, to get his back scratched.”
“No kidding?” I asked.
“No kidding,” Dr. Harrison said, nodding.
Mama put her hands up. “Please! Don’t tell me I’m going to be raising a toad all by myself when Jessie’s old enough to go off to college.”
“I’ll take him to college with me,” I said.
“Toads may be smart, but I doubt if they’re that smart!” Mama joked. “Anyway, for right now, why don’t we put Mr. Perkins back in his terrarium? And you two toad lovers can go get all those toad germs washed off your hands before we have our lemonade.”
“Mirabelle,” Dr. Harrison said, “you would have made a good nurse.”
“Hmm, I don’t know about that,” Mama said. “Go put Mr. Perkins away, Jessie.”
“Here, I can take him,” I said, retrieving Mr. Perkins and whispering to him, “You’ve got a new friend, too.”
twenty-two
OUR FRIEND WARREN—he said I should call him that—stayed for dinner. He was on his way to a conference in Georgia and had left Chicago a day early to stop in and see us.
We used our holiday dishes and the store-bought tablecloth, and Mama beamed and gabbed all evening. After dinner we played rummy and I won. Warren accused me of being a card shark. “I bet your grandmother’s been teaching you some of her tricks,” he said.
“Grandma?” I asked blankly.
“Don’t tell me she hasn’t taught you some of the things she learned in Las Vegas?” Warren shook his head and laughed. “Now, she’s a card shark.”
This didn’t surprise me. It figured that Grandma was a card shark. She was probably a sneaky one, too.
“Mirabelle told me in her letters that Anna Mae’s lived in a lot of interesting places,” he continued. “She’s a fascinating woman.”
“Grandma?” I asked again.
“Jessie and my mother haven’t been . . . well, on the best of terms lately,” Mama said.
“She doesn’t like Mr. Perkins,” I told Warren. “Among other things.” I didn’t want to spoil the night by going into the whole long list of what Grandma didn’t like.
“Well, she’s always been a woman of strong convictions. I admire her for that.”
“Grandma?” I repeated.
Mama gave me a look, and then said to him, “We’re working on Grandma.”
Warren slowly dealt the next hand. “I see,” he said. And then with a little arch of one eyebrow he asked, “So, what kind of car is she driving these days?” We all three looked at each other and cracked up laughing.
We were having so much fun that Mama let me stay up late. But even after I went to bed, I could still hear them talking quietly in the living room.
I was just drifting off to sleep when Warren came into my room. “I came to say goodbye,” he said.
I sat up and turned on my seashell lamp. “You can come again. Anytime.”
“I’ll try.” He smiled, and then he picked up my hand and held it for a moment. I looked at our two hands, one dark and one light.
“I’m so happy we’ve met,” he said. “You weren’t born yet when I left Hiram. I should have stopped by long ago.”
“Why’d you leave?”
“Oh, lots of reasons,” he said, shaking his head. “Mainly, it was time to go.”
We were quiet for a while. I lay back down on my pillow wishing he could stay longer.
“Do you really think Mama would have made a good nurse?” I asked him.
“Absolutely! She was one of my best students. Has she mentioned nursing school lately?” he asked.
“No. I know she worked with you at the hospital and all, but now she works for Lester at the Gas and Go.”
“How is Lester?”
“He says his joints hurt him. But Mama and I are taking good care of him.”
“I bet you are,” he said, smiling. “You know, Jessie, I don’t have any children of my own. But if I did, I would want them to be as strong and as loving as you are.”
“Hah!” I laughed. “Me? Loving? Mama says I fight waaaay too much. It’s because I’m easily riled.”
“That’s only because you love so fiercely”
“You think so?” This was a totally new thought to me. I didn’t know that love could be fierce.
“I’m sure of it. And I’m glad Mirabelle has you to love her so much. You hang on tight to each other,” he said. Then he stood up to go. “I’ll stop by again for another visit someday. And I’ll give Mr. Perkins a good scratch then.”
“You promise?”
“Promise,” he said. Then he tucked me in, and was gone.
In the morning I thought he might have been a dream. But I knew he wasn’t, because Mama was singing as she made biscuits and gravy for breakfast.
twenty-three
AFTER BREAKFAST MAMA SAID, “Come here, light of my life.” She began to measure me for a new school dress. “You’re growing so much I can’t use one of your old dresses as a pattern. I’ll have to make a new pattern from scratch.” She always made her own patterns from pieces of newspaper rath
er than spend money buying them.
“Stand still!” she ordered, laughing. I tried not to fidget as she measured and jotted down numbers on a little scrap piece of paper.
I listened to her humming to herself and decided to take advantage of having almost all of her attention. “Mama?”
“Hmm?” she mumbled, the tape measure in her mouth. She pushed up on one arm, set my hips straight, and generally manhandled me into the position she wanted.
“I’ve never met a Negro doctor before.”
“Well,” she said, taking the tape measure out of her mouth and starting to stretch it down my arm, “there aren’t many around here. But there are lots in Chicago, where he lives and works now.”
“He said you were one of his best students.”
“He did, huh? Well, he was one of my best teachers. There was a special program at the Hiram hospital back then for students to see if nursing or doctoring was something they really wanted to do. Warren was setting that program up. That’s how we met.”
I remembered that Grandma always snorted or shook her head whenever his name was mentioned. “And he’s not just a teacher, he’s a real doctor, too?”
“Yes!” Mama said, yanking my arm down.
“Ouch!”
“I’m sorry. He is really a doctor. And a good friend.”
“How come he’s such a good friend?” I asked. “You don’t see each other much, not like Robert and me.”
At this, Mama sat down at the table. She settled back into the chair and got quiet, like she was pulling thoughts in from a long, long way away. “He helped me once, through a very bad time. We helped each other. That’s what friends do. And you don’t forget that, no matter how far apart you live or how seldom you see each other.”
I thought about how I was trying to help Robert get his glasses. “What bad time, Mama?” I asked.
Mama jotted down a number on her scrap paper, and sat staring at what she’d just written. She was quiet for so long that I was afraid to move.
“There was . . . there were some bad times for a little while around Hiram and Baylor. Believe me, the people here were not too happy about a black doctor coming to town—especially one who was supposed to take care of white patients and supervise white students and doctors in a new program. I think even the hospital was surprised when he got here.” Mama looked at me and gave a little shrug. “Some people weren’t too happy that we became friends.”
“What happened?” I sat down on a chair by Mama. “Was that when . . .” I was almost afraid to ask it, but I’d heard bits of conversation all my life. “Was that when someone set fire to our house?”
Mama looked sharply at me. I ducked my head down and scratched at the tabletop. “Folks talk,” I said.
“Yes. Unfortunately, they do.” Mama took a deep breath and pushed aside her measuring tape, paper, and pencil. “I guess you’re old enough to know some of this. And you’ve met Warren now.
“You see, some people didn’t like it that Warren and I were friends. It might have been OK if he’d just been one of my instructors. But we ate lunch together, there in the hospital cafeteria or around town. And quite a few times he gave me a ride home. Grandma and I had the old Studebaker then. Half the time it didn’t run. Your grandpa had been dead for a long time already, and he was the only one who’d been able to keep it going.”
She sighed. “Certain people started calling me bad names. They didn’t like seeing a white woman and a black man together. They were mean to Grandma and me, and, of course, very mean to Warren. Sometimes they played bad tricks on him. It got dangerous, for all of us.”
“Adam says some folks are just plain mean, like Dickie Whitten,” I said.
“Oh, Dickie. Well, Adam may be right. But sometimes there’s a reason for it. In Dickie’s case, his father’s a hard one. I wouldn’t turn my back on Curtis Whitten, even in broad daylight.”
After yesterday morning I knew exactly what Mama was talking about. “Was Mr. Whitten one of the people who was mean to you?”
“Yes. Him and others, too. Doyle wasn’t very nice; he and Curtis would go out drinking together. Doyle tried not to show it too much, though, because Beryl Ann and I were such good friends.
“Anyway,” Mama continued, “like I said, my daddy—your grandpa—wasn’t there to help. Only Grandma and me in that little house. Lester tried to help. Warren, too, tried to make it not so hard on us. But we had to work together at the hospital. And you’ve met him; I couldn’t help but like him. I know how much you liked your teacher last year, Mr. Prichard. Well, I liked Warren like that. And then, even though he was a lot older than me, we became friends the way you and Robert are. We always knew how to joke with each other, and how to help each other.
“Besides, I guess the famous Bovey temper runs in me, too. What right did anyone have to tell me who my friends could be? That just made me mad.
“Then one night, while Grandma and I were in Bartlettsville shopping, someone set the house on fire. Everything gone! All our family treasures, your great grandma’s quilts, our pictures—gone. Though it wasn’t much, that house had been your grandpa’s pride and joy. It was hard on Grandma.”
I’d always figured that the fire was why I’d never seen a picture of Grandpa Henry. I just hadn’t been sure that the rumors were true—that someone had actually done it on purpose. But now I knew. Someone had come in the night and taken it all away: our house, our history, and our pictures of Grandpa Henry. I thought about Lester and his house, how right and permanent it felt, and I didn’t have any of that. Someone had taken it all. “Who?” I asked, gripping the edge of the table. “Did they catch who did it?”
“No.” Mama shook her head. “We tried to find out. The authorities said it probably burned down because it was old. But we knew the house was in good shape. No one believed Grandma when she told them. Actually, I don’t think anyone wanted to know the truth. And then there were other things to worry about. We had to get on with our lives.”
“What other things? Why didn’t you fight them, Mama? Why didn’t you make sure that whoever burned down our house got caught? I’d make them pay for it!” I said, folding my arms. I was furious. I couldn’t understand why Mama hadn’t fought back; I knew she wasn’t a coward.
Mama pushed back her hair and looked at me steadily. “I was pregnant,” she said. “You were on the way. That had to be our first consideration.”
Suddenly, it felt like hot liquid was draining from my feet. Like someone had opened up a spigot on my heels and let all the anger out. “Oh.”
“We needed money.” Mama rushed on. “There were things we had to replace, things to buy for a new baby. There wasn’t much insurance. Lester hired me to help him. And”—she smiled—” you won’t believe it, but Grandma even got a job in Bartlettsville.
“We lived with friends for a short time until our . . . until this house of Lester’s became empty and he let us live here. It was hard on him, too, what with my pregnancy showing. People were talking about me; they didn’t want me to wait on them in the store. But Lester, he stuck by us. Afterward, I just didn’t have the energy or the time to go back to the student program at the hospital. Besides, Warren had left by then, and there were people at the hospital I did not want to work with anymore.”
Mama fiddled with the stuff on the table. I didn’t say anything for a long time. Finally, it seemed like the right moment to ask, “What about my father? Did he help us?”
Mama’s head jerked up suddenly, and her mouth formed a tight line. “No. He didn’t,” she said.
Something wasn’t right. The quick, hard look on Mama’s face scared me a little. So instead I asked, “What about Warren? What did he do?”
“He helped us a lot. But he finally had to go. It got so he couldn’t even see me for my checkups. People heard about it, they talked.”
“What’d they say?”
Mama had relaxed a little again. She reached out, stroked my arm, and smiled. “Oh, mostly st
uff to get other folks heated up. They didn’t understand about my friendship with Warren, how we just liked to talk and make each other laugh. They said I’d have a black baby, for sure.” She shrugged her shoulders again. “That part didn’t bother me. But after the house burned down, Warren said he had to leave, for my sake and for yours. That bothered me a loti I cried a bucketful when he left.”
Then Mama kind of shook me a little and looked into my face. “That’s why he was so excited about seeing you yesterday. He went through a lot for you.”
I’d thought he wanted to see me only because of my letter. “I like Warren. I wish he could have stayed longer,” I said.
“Me, too.” Mama smiled. Then she tapped me on the nose with her finger. “Just remember, there are lots of people who love you. And even if you can’t be with them, they’re still there, keeping a place in their hearts for you. Warren, Lester, Grandma—”
“Grandma?” I interrupted.
“Yes, even Grandma. I was so proud of her,” Mama said. “She didn’t let anyone talk down to me. Or to you, after you were born.”
I couldn’t picture Grandma standing up for me. “Are you sure?”
“Don’t misjudge your grandmother,” Mama warned. “Sure, she can be hard to get along with sometimes. But it’s when things are bad and you really need to pull together that you judge a person. Grandma’s been there for us when we needed her—always.”
I still found this a little hard to believe and might have argued, but Mama stood up and said, “Well, we went to so much trouble to get you into the world, now let’s get you measured so we can clothe you and send you to school.”
“You could forget about the school part,” I teased as she started measuring me around the chest.
“Now, let me see . . . a whopping thirty inches for the boooooooooozuums,” Mama drawled out, making me crack up laughing. “But don’t worry,” she said. “Someday you’ll leave DeeDee and Lorelei in the dust. Only yours will be real.”
“Mama!” I said, shocked, as I thought, Fat chance of that ever happening.
We were laughing so hard that it was a complete surprise when Robert swung the screen door wide and stepped in. “Someone’s wrecked the clubhouse!” he shouted and grabbed me by the hand.