Promise

by Minrose Gwin

  But really, Dreama went because the Heroines of Jericho held a nursery for the babies every time the church doors opened. It wasn’t God she was after, it was a few minutes’ peace and quiet. Promise was a pistol. When he was the size of a newborn pup and waking up and crying every few hours, Dreama would drop him off with the Heroines of Jericho and hole up in the last pew and sleep through the service. Sometimes she forgot to wake up when the service was over and everybody else got up to leave. Then one of the nursery ladies would have to bring Promise to her. But nobody cast aspersions on Dreama. What had happened to her was a crime. If she wanted to sleep in church all day, well, let her do it. Maybe a piece of the good Lord would seep in through the skin, buck her up. She was too young for any of this, she was just a baby herself. It was a miracle she’d taken to the child at all. Truth be told, it was reported to Dovey, some of the nursery ladies let Promise cry longer than the other babies, let him cry a little too much; some cringed when they had to change him. Some, nobody’d mentioned names, gave him his bottle in his bed instead of holding him close like they held the others.

  Before Promise clawed his way into the world, Dreama had spent all her time hating the thing inside her, had, in fact, sat on the edge of the bed with her legs crossed after her water broke and pronounced she wasn’t going to have it, it could just go back where it came from. Gertrude Fisher, who delivered babies up on the Hill and down in Shake Rag and who, like everyone, knew what had happened to Dreama, told the girl to push and get it over with, but Dreama wouldn’t. After a good long time, all that day and most of the night, so long that Dovey was about to send Virgil for the doctor, Promise pushed himself out, landing on the bed slam-bam facedown and crying his first mad where’s-my-ma’am cry into the old sheet Dovey had put under her granddaughter.

  Dreama delivered the afterbirth and turned her face to the wall, told Dovey to take that screaming thing out of there, she couldn’t stand the sight of it.

  The baby, pink as a piglet and still gelatinous, looked more like the expulsion of a foreign body, a tumor, than a child.

  “Lord,” Gertrude Fisher said quietly. She gave Dovey a long look, then got a washcloth and began to wipe him clean.

  Dovey took a deep breath and looked away. Not the child’s doing, she told herself. He didn’t ask to get born.

  A week passed, then two. He grew into a pretty baby. Sweet like Dreama. Cooing and whapping the air, a whisper of a smile. The light brown hair, just slightly curled. Skin the color of mayonnaise. Those gold eyes, where did they come from?

  Those first weeks Dreama flat-out refused to name him. The first day she refused her breasts to the snuffling creature, said he reminded her of a toad. Finally Dovey brought him in to her and held him aloft screaming and kicking. “You want this baby to die because you starved him to death?” she demanded of her granddaughter. “Ain’t you got some act-right in you, girl? Where’s your heart?”

  Then she placed him on the bed beside Dreama and walked out.

  She stood behind the doorway and listened. After awhile, a shift of weight on the bed and the cries suddenly hushed.

  For weeks, though, Dreama wouldn’t get out of the bed or leave her room except to relieve herself out back. The baby slept in an old laundry basket next to Dovey and Virgil’s mattress in the main room of the house, and Dovey took care of all his needs except for the feedings. Even then she had to bring the child to the mother, who took him indifferently, staring into space as he fed, holding him just enough to get him to the breast. At night Dovey and Virgil could hear Dreama lying up in bed crying. Who the baby now—the child or the mother? asked Virgil.

  It was Virgil who’d come up with the name Promise, though the child was hardly that. Dovey thought the name a bit much, nobody having made any promises in the getting of this baby, quite the opposite, actually. But they were all suffering, no need to cause more by quarreling over a name.

  Before Dreama had Promise, Dovey and Virgil moved out of the one bedroom in the dogtrot into the main room, hoping that when the baby came Dreama would take one look and see something that could be loved, a dimple, a fingernail, an eyelash. And after awhile, miracle of all miracles, she did. One night, when Dovey went to retrieve him from nursing, she found Dreama sitting up in bed with him in her lap. She was holding both of his feet in the palm of her hand. She wasn’t smiling but she wasn’t crying either. Look how pretty his feet are, she said to her grandmother, look how regular his toes go down.

  After that they brought the basket into the bedroom and Dreama got up on her own to clean him up and feed him. In the weeks that followed she made up for lost time in getting acquainted. She couldn’t get enough of her son. Every inch of him from head to toe interested her: his hair, his buttercup mouth, those delicious jelly rolls of fat on his thighs. In his right armpit he had a small red birthmark that looked like a cloud, and she would pull up his arm and kiss him there again and again, making his milky eyes wobble in his head. She started dressing him in little outfits and taking him with her on errands.

  By then the money had started coming. A crisp twenty, folded inside a blank piece of paper, arrived like clockwork the first of every month. A small fortune.

  They never spoke of it. Dovey could barely stand to touch the cream-colored envelope, which came with no return address. Each month she took it out of the mailbox, handling it by the edge like it was hot, and laid it on Dreama’s bed. Sometimes Dreama bought herself a new outfit from what was inside. Last month she’d gone down and bought them all a Silver 155 radio at Hall’s Electric, a rounded rectangle made of walnut. Dovey frowned when Dreama presented it to her—she should be saving that money, not spending it on trifles—but Dovey loved to run her hand up and down its curved sides while she listened every week to the President talk about hardship and tribulation and courage and how they were all in this together and citizens needed to have faith that better days were at hand.

  Dovey liked the word citizen. She rolled it around on her tongue like a caramel. Two years ago, when the President had come to town, her town, she’d gone down to Robins Field and stood at the back of the crowd with the other Negroes to hear him talk about progress and jobs and cheap power. He was in the wheelchair so she only got a glimpse of him, but she liked the way his voice rang out, presidential yet intimate, the way he didn’t talk down to regular folks like herself. She pictured him sitting at her own kitchen table, his leg braces propped on the chair, his eyepiece sliding down his nose, bow tie askew, sipping a cup of warmed-up coffee and having a good heart-to-heart with her about hard times, her own up close and personal fireside chat. She’d cut his picture out of the paper and tacked it to the wall.

  Mostly, though, the money went for Promise, his extra milk and clothes, his medicine when he got that cold last month. Even so, when the baby reached three months, Virgil asked Dreama about the money, how much of it she’d been holding back, hiding God knows where, and what she intended to do with it. Thirty dollars, as it turned out, too much to have hanging around the house. He told Dreama they needed to get that kind of money into the bank, or the word would get out and no telling what kind of trash would come calling in the dead of night. Plus Dreama needed to get back to school come September; she’d been out long enough. No grandchild of his, no matter how unlucky, was going without a high school diploma. The money would pay for somebody to take care of Promise while Dovey made her rounds. The money was Dreama’s future, her ticket to that college up in Holly Springs.

  So just that past week, Dovey and Dreama had put Promise in Dovey’s laundry cart and walked into downtown to the People’s Bank and Trust Company on the corner of Main and Broadway. That morning Dovey had put on her good dress with the climbing rose print, long sleeved and high collared, and a round-brimmed felt hat that so dwarfed her head she had to tie it on with one of Virgil’s old belts. Dreama wore a new polka-dotted skirt and blouse, which hung on her because she’d not been allowed to try it on in the store and of course couldn’t return
it for a smaller size.

  In the cart, Promise brimmed with goodwill. When Dreama pulled him from the cart and they came into the bank, struggling with the heavy door, he smiled that gummy smile of his, lighting up the whole place. They stood uncertainly in the middle of the floor under the gleaming chandelier, waiting for the line of white people to go up and do their business. A woman in line reached over and touched Promise’s head, twirled a curl the color of lightly browned toast. Promise turned and looked up at her, swatted at her hand, and grinned from ear to ear. The woman smiled back and looked at Dovey. “Whose baby y’all taking care of? Never seen this one before.”

  Dovey’s mouth opened and closed. Dreama glared at the woman. “This is my baby.”

  The woman’s eyes widened, the hand came away. She faced forward again and began to whisper into the ear of the woman ahead of her in line, who turned to look.

  Dreama drew herself up and said, again, “My baby.” Louder this time, causing Dovey to frown at her granddaughter, move between her and the white women as though she were herding the girl, shake her head at Dreama, touch her lightly on the hip.

  They waited a good long time. When there were no more white customers in line and they got up to the bank window, the cashier sucked her teeth. Dreama looked too young to be opening a savings account. How old was she? Where, pray tell, had all that money come from?

  Dovey stepped forward. “Come from my laundry money. This girl’s my granddaughter and I got a mind to give it to her.”

  Dreama giggled. Dovey shot her a look.

  The woman had a long chin ending in several white curly whiskers. “Well, you’ll have to put your name on the account too.”

  When they finally left with nothing but a little book with $30.00 written in it, Dreama stopped on the corner outside the bank and told her grandmother she wanted to go back inside and get her money back from the goat lady. She had a bad feeling about letting white people get hold of her money.

  Dovey put a hand on her granddaughter’s shoulder. “Wait a while, baby.” Dreama was changeable, flighty. She was only a girl, after all. Tomorrow it would be something else.

  On the way home, Promise grinned and reached for the strands of forsythia that lined the street. Dovey couldn’t help but smile at him. He had the same goofy grin Dreama had had when she came to them. She’d come on the eleven o’clock M&O from way down in New Orleans almost two years to the day that Dovey and Virgil’s only child, Charlesetta, named after his father’s father, had jumped a boxcar and ridden as far south as the M&O traveled. Before she left she didn’t make any bones about the fact that she wasn’t staying in this podunk town, living up on the Hill or, worse yet down in Shake Rag, the rest of her life, cleaning up white folks’ dirt, cooking their food. She was good with numbers, Dovey had seen to that, and she could sing. She got it in her head that, in New Orleans, she could wait tables and get tips and eventually, with that voice of hers, sing in bars.

  Charlesetta was eighteen by then, a grown woman, but Virgil had all but hog-tied her to keep her from leaving. New Orleans was nothing but a dream somebody thought up, he told her. People starving down there in that den of iniquity, white trash thick as thieves. She’d buy herself trouble she couldn’t even conjure; she’d end up in Storyville gyrating around in nothing but her underwear. They’d pick over her like garbage, use her up, and toss her out on the street. Virgil knew what he was talking about too. His father, a Creole man named George Grand’homme, had come to Tupelo from New Orleans to work as a porter on the Frisco railroad. He told Virgil stories about the too-much honkytonking that liked to have ruined him if he hadn’t wised up and moved north. He told Virgil he never wanted to hear tell of him heading down there.

  One night, Virgil and Charlesetta fought it out. He begged her to go to Memphis if she had to leave. Virgil and Dovey could visit her, she could come home for Christmas. “Memphis is one big old Mississippi,” she’d said. “I’m looking to get out of Mississippi. I’m looking to get away from white folks’ laundry.”

  “That laundry put food in your mouth, girl.” Virgil took her by the shoulders then and shoved her. It was the only time he’d ever laid hands on her, but it landed her on the floor.

  When Dovey tried to pull her up, Charlesetta snarled, “Get your hands off me.”

  The next morning she was gone. Dovey cried and cried. “You run off my baby,” she told Virgil.

  After awhile they started getting letters about the heat in New Orleans and gravy sandwiches and juke joints and shotgun houses. Charlesetta was eating good and feeling good. She didn’t mention how she was making a living or where she was staying. Important, necessary things. She didn’t offer an address they could write back to.

  The baby girl came to Dovey and Virgil in the arms of a sour-faced nun wearing an astonishing hat that looked like a big white bird had landed on her head. Charlesetta came on the same train but in a box, which was taken from a freight car at Crosstown and rushed to Porter’s Funeral Home. When they got the telegram—the death in childbirth, the baby girl they were to expect shortly—Dovey and Virgil, who’d paid fifty cents a week to a policy man named Fred Holcomb, a white man with a big red pocked nose, tried to cash in but were told that Charlesetta was too old to still be on the policy. They went ahead and bought the burial plot in a far corner of Springhill Cemetery under the scrub pine and took back the baby bed they’d long ago turned over to the church nursery.

  When the train came in, Dovey took one long look at the baby in the nun’s arms and burst into tears. She’d been crying nonstop for Charlesetta but a little voice in her head had whispered, At least there’s the baby. When she saw Dreama for the first time, her hand went to her mouth but not before something between a gasp and a curse came out. Now this! Charlesetta, what you gone and done?

  It opened a door that couldn’t be closed. Weeks later Dovey was still crying, her tears dripping into the wash and onto the baby’s chest as she changed her. She woke up crying and went to sleep crying; she cried in her sleep. The word about Charlesetta’s baby spread. There was a constant procession of Heroines of Jericho bearing flowers, fresh-cut from gardens up and down the street, and plates of chicken and potato salad. Some came out of kindness, some out of curiosity. There were cobblers, peach and apple. Lloyd Pickens from up the street brought Dovey one of his hams. She could barely eat a bite. She thought of her namesakes, the doves, who took flight only when things got too bad on the ground, how they cried out as they scattered. All the fluid seemed to be leaving her body; she grew shriveled and light. Her hair turned gray almost overnight.

  She laid it all at Virgil’s feet. He’d driven her child away. When he came in at night, she exchanged his work clothes for his house clothes without saying a word. She didn’t heat up his coffee or make small talk with him over supper. Some nights she tended Dreama instead of sitting down at the table with him.

  One morning, as she was diapering her dead daughter’s baby, the child’s hand, light as the cotton on Virgil’s work clothes, touched her cheek, and the tears, shed and unshed, froze into a chunk of ice.

  Virgil meanwhile had named the baby Dreama because, for him, given the situation, she was a dream come true, a way to start over, to make good on the promise he somehow felt he’d broken to their daughter, to keep her safe, to make her happy with what she had. He built Dreama a little bed on the side of Dovey’s laundry cart, the same cart she would use to take Promise to the bank sixteen years later. Dovey took Dreama on her rounds—what else could she do with her?—gathering the dirty and delivering the clean. When folks up on the Hill would bend over the laundry cart and their eyes widen when they took in the baby’s color, the straight hair and freckles, the green eyes, Dovey would glare at them, her eyes flashing, defying them to roll their eyes or make a noise under their breath.

  The years went by, and little Dreama lived up to her name. She was sweet and pliant where her mother had been sassy and stubborn. She loved school and went willingly, joyfully.
Weekends she helped Dovey with the ironing. She stayed after school to help some of the slower ones learn to read, going over their lessons with them on the board since they had no books. She leapfrogged over two grades and decided she was going to go to college and be a teacher, come back to Carver High and teach English. At night, instead of running off to Shake Rag to hear Lonnie Williams or Nap Hayes play in the juke joints the way her mother had done, she moved the iron back and forth over the men’s shirts in Dovey’s laundry basket—arms and cuffs first, then backs and sides, finally the collar—and went on and on about literacy being the key to Negro advancement in the professions. Smart as a whip, her English teacher, Etherene Johnson, told Dovey and Virgil; they needed to start putting money away to send Dreama up to Holly Springs to Rust College, where Ida B. Wells had gone. Etherene said the teachers at Carver, some of whom had gone to Rust, were bound and determined that girl was going to get a scholarship.

  Dreama’s other talent was gathering strays: dogs with ridges for backbones and wormy half-dead kittens, wall-eyed children from over in Shake Rag, broken-winged sparrows that hopped around the yard, pecking at the dirt like chickens. One Saturday morning Dreama went out to take back some clean laundry to the McNabbs and showed up at home carrying something with a pink pointy snout. Dovey, rolling some wet clothes through the wringer, jumped halfway across the porch.

  “What you doing, girl, carrying around a rat like it was a baby? Bite your fingers off, make you sick. Ain’t you got good sense?”

  “It’s a guinea pig, Granny,” Dreama said. “I found him in a ditch over on Church Street. Must have been somebody’s pet got loose. Named him Henry.”