I made it halfway to my room before Callie ran up behind me.
“I can’t find my pajamas,” she said, breathlessly.
“So?”
“So, can you help me find them?”
“I have to put mine on first.”
“That’s okay. I’ll come with you.”
In her room, we were shy with each other. Callie tried to hide herself while she changed. When we were both finished, I began to leave, but she caught my hand.
“Well, what is it?”
“Shouldn’t we say good night to them?” Callie asked.
“I don’t want to,” I said, and regretted it.
“Why?”
“They should have stayed with us, not Charlie.”
“We’re too old for that.”
“That doesn’t matter. It’s our first night here.”
“They asked us to say good night.” Callie still held my hand. She shuffled her feet back and forth over the marble floor and we both listened for a bit to the unfamiliar sound.
“I feel bad not saying good night to them,” Callie said finally.
I sighed. “Fine. We’ll do it. Come on.”
When we got to our parents’ room, they were already in bed. In the soft glow from the lamp on the nightstand my father sat propped up on a bank of the Toneybee’s pillows, his glasses off, a book open on his lap. My mother was already curled up beside him. It was only when we got to the edge of the bed that we saw Charlie lying in the space between them.
My mother said, “This is a onetime thing.”
Callie leaned forward to kiss them good night. She bent toward my mother but just as her lips brushed her cheek, Charlie lifted one thin finger and swatted it hard across Callie’s face. She jerked back, surprised.
“It’s okay. You scared him, that’s all,” my mother explained.
Callie nodded, tried to smile. It was special to be touched by Charlie, even if it was a blow. “Good night,” she called to Charlie, who kept his finger crooked above his head, a warning.
I took Callie’s hand and we turned and started down the hallway back to her room. We were halfway there when we heard it. First it sounded like something in a cartoon—“hoo hoo hoo”—too silly to be real. Then a wheeze. Then a wail, so low, so long, so hollow, that it sounded like the most sorrowful sound in the world. It was a very old sound, something that had welled up from a deep and hidden place to whip and sting the world. The sound suddenly broke, left a jagged stillness that was worse than the crying. I held my breath. It was a relief when it started up again.
Callie and I hurried back to our parents’ room.
When we got there, all the lights were on. In the glare of the overhead lamp I saw Charlie cling first to my mother’s nightgown and then to the sheets of the bed. He arched his whole body and then flattened himself over and over again.
My mother knelt beside him on the bed, trying to get her hands on the small of his back, on his arms, anywhere, but he wouldn’t be still. With his mouth that wide open, I could see all the way down his throat, maybe almost to his heart, to something red and shaking.
My mother was saying over and over again, “Please, sweetheart, please love, please.” My father was out of bed, standing behind her, hands hovering above her. “All right now, all right now,” he murmured.
But Charlie kept crying. He would not be comforted by any words they said.
Nymphadora of Spring City, 1929
My mother was a Star of the Morning. My father was a Saturnite. I was first an Infant Auxiliary Star, and then I was a Girl Star, then a Young Lady Star, and three years ago, right before Mumma and Pop drank a jigger of cyanide each, I became, in my own right, a full-blown Star of the Morning, Fifth House, Second Quadrant Division, North Eastern Lodge of the colored hamlet of Spring City in the town of Courtland County, Massachusetts.
After my parents committed suicide I declared, if only to myself, that I was no longer a Star of the Morning. But even now, three years on, I can’t stop wearing my pin. During the day while I’m teaching class, it’s hidden under my shirt collar, pinned right up close to the front of my throat. At night, after I’ve dressed my hair and put it in its cap, after I’ve rubbed my face first with cold cream and then a worn, oily piece of chamois, I do what Mumma showed me. I stand in front of the mirror, my skin all greasy and soft, and I take off the pin while staring at my reflection. A Star of the Morning is never allowed to look directly at her pin. My pin is a small brass knot filed down to look like a burst of light, with a rusty garnet in the middle. When I was an Infant Star, I would stand in the mirror beside Mumma, watching our reflections’ fingers at work unfastening our pins and I was filled with love. I thought it was the most beautiful thing in the world. Mumma told me it was better than a diamond.
Stars of the Morning always take off their pins before they sleep, and always before their evening prayers, so as not to make a false idol out of it. Now when I take off my pin, I place it on my nightstand, and then, if I was to follow what Mumma taught me, I am supposed to reflect on my moral failings during the day and recite the Lord’s Prayer because Stars of the Morning are good Christian Negro women. But no one, if they could read my thoughts, would call me a Christian anymore, and besides, I don’t believe in prayer, so during this bit of the routine I try to just sit quiet on my bed. But after years of ritual, I can’t help myself. Even when I’m dumb, the blood in my ears pounds out the rhythm of “Our Father, who art in heaven.” To drown out these pious cadences, in my head I sometimes chant the obscene version I learned as a girl: “Our Father, who farts in heaven, whorish be his name.”
I am a thirty-six-year-old unmarried, orphaned Negro schoolteacher, in charge of a room full of impressionable young colored minds and every night, I sing a dirty nursery rhyme to help me go to sleep. It is enough to laugh, if I did not always feel like weeping.
The time for prayer over, ready for bed, the last thing I do before I lie down and blow out the light is to stand before the mirror again and pinch the pin between my fingers and very carefully stick it to the lace collar of my nightgown. I’ve slept with the pin for as long as I can remember. At the base of my neck, just below the collarbone, is a livid red line from its sharpest end drawing on me.
MY BEST MEMORY is of Initiation. I was seven years old. We stood in front of the church basement door, on a lawn so bright you could see the green even in dusk. My mother was the most powerful Star in Spring City so I was the head of the line, even though I didn’t want to be. I was terrified. An older girl had once told me that to become an Infant Star, they set your hair on fire. Her friend said the big women Stars made you shake a dead lady’s hand, the hand of the very first Star who ever lived. “The big women Stars keep it in a special box,” she said, “and when you shake it the bones crunch and the dust gets on your fingers. The dead lady’s dust is what makes you a Star.”
I had asked Mumma about all of these rumors and she told me they were nonsense and those girls were just jealous. Their mothers were loose women and the girls had proven themselves unruly and so they could never become an Infant Star like me. But I remained uneasy, and when I pressed Mumma, she still wouldn’t tell me exactly what happened at Initiation. All my life I thought we had no secrets between us. The year before, when our tabby Dina birthed a litter, she told me frank and true how cats and people were made. She told me how the universe came to be, and where our earth stood in it, and that God did not live in the sun but in the breath and air and dust around and within us. “The sun is just a very bright ball,” she told me. Which was more than the other mothers told their children. But she wouldn’t tell me about becoming a Star, as many times as I asked her.
For Initiation, I wore a white lace dress and patent leather shoes Mumma ordered special from Boston. Nine little girls pressed against my back, all breathing heavy. We had to fast for a day and a night before Initiation. According to the bylaws of the Stars of the Morning, Infant Stars are supposed to consume only milk and honey, and they have
to chant “I am a vessel for the light of our Lord” before they drink it. But no one in Spring City could afford honey, so we drank our milk with raw brown sugar instead. I breathed the rotten sweetness of it on the other children’s spit and in their girlish sweat.
I squeezed my eyes shut very tight and kept them that way until I heard the basement door of the church rumble open. I heard the girls behind me breathe quicker, talk faster. I felt something brush against my hand. The dead woman, I thought, but the hand that took mine was fat and warm and it led me very carefully down the steps and into the church basement. Once I was there, it smelled the same as it always had, like earth and the moths that ate the choir robes and the greening tin of the church collection plate. I almost opened my eyes. But a voice said, “Keep your lights closed, Infant Star.” Right beneath my chin I felt a point of warmth and I knew that it was someone holding a candle close to my face. This comforted me, somehow, to know the light was near. I heard the other girls stumble down the stairs one by one. Most gasped. A few of the very young ones started to cry. Then I heard the basement door rumble shut. I opened my eyes. And I laughed.
I laughed because even though the room smelled just the same, when I opened my eyes I saw it had become the most beautiful place I have ever been in my life, before or since. It wasn’t dark. The earth walls were covered in white paper. What seemed like a thousand candles were lit all around us, in tiny glass and tin lanterns. Strings of white hydrangea were threaded across the top of the room. Clouds hung down from the ceiling and for a moment I thought, Mumma’s brought down the very sky to greet me. But then I saw that it was just tulle, from Miss Vera’s dress shop, doubled up on itself to seem like heaven.
We jumbled ourselves all up until we formed a new line. I was now in the middle. Mumma strode out before us in a long white robe trimmed with yellow. She held a gold-bound Bible in her hands. She opened a page at random, and one by one we had to hover a finger over the Bible, let it fall down, and then read from whichever passage we chose. The passage gave us our secret name, the name only other Stars knew us by.
The poor girl before me chose Herod, and she cried and cried because she was going to have to go by the name of a known baby killer. I thought for certain Mumma would let Herod pick again, but she only looked on sternly as another Star patted the little girl’s back and told her some quickly made-up nonsense about this being a splendid opportunity to restore honor to the name. I was relieved, then, when I picked Nymphadora. My real name is Ellen, but Nymphadora is so much better. I bet you didn’t know there was a Nymphadora in the Bible. There is. Colossians 4:15. Later I found out our Bible was a mistranslation—it should have read “Nympha,” and Nympha should have been a man. It was by some lucky magic that I got so fine a name as Nymphadora of the Spring City Stars.
Nymphadora sounded beautiful and elegant and pretty and peak. I liked that the Nymphadora in our Bible ran a church in her own home. I was proud of the name, but when I turned and threw a smile at Mumma she did not return it.
When we were all newly named, Mumma inspected the ten of us and still did not speak. She raised her hand and Miss Vera and another Star rolled out a tea table stacked with food. Real food: bowls of potatoes and biscuits and a lank turkey with its bony ankles wrapped in paper to keep its marrow warm. Our deflated stomachs, milk-lined and sugary, leapt in revolt. But Mumma wouldn’t let us eat. Instead, she stood in front of the table.
“Girls,” she said, “you are almost Infant Stars. Do you know what makes a Star shine?”
No one answered. We were all watching the spread behind her, too hungry to speak.
“Girls,” she said, “I have asked you a question. A tenet of being an Infant Star is to speak when you are spoken to. So we will begin again. What makes a Star shine?”
The newly named Herod sniffed loudly, wiped the snot from her face. “The light of heaven?” she offered, cautiously. It was a good guess, as we’d had to drone this phrase incessantly for the past few days as we fasted.
“No,” Mumma said. “No. Not the light of heaven. What makes a Star of the Morning shine, what makes an Infant Star shine among all the other pieces of dust and dirt and rock that are our Lord’s creations, is self-control. Denial. Denial builds up inside little Infant Stars like you, makes your moral fiber strong like flint, so that when the world tests you, when the world rubs up against you all vicious and sharp and everything within you, everything is telling you to give in, all you desire is to give in, do you know what happens? You don’t give in. You don’t become soft. You ignore your desires. The world’s trials stir up a light in you so strong, so pure, so true, no man on earth can put it out. Denial of your desires is what makes an Infant Star shine.”
Mumma leaned up against the table and crossed her arms over her chest. She lifted her chin up to the paper clouds and began to declaim.
And even though she was my mother and even though I worshipped her, I wanted to groan because I was a smart little Star and I could read between the lines and see, despite that turkey’s paper socks, promising meat kept warm, we weren’t going to be eating anything anytime soon, and when we finally did, it would most certainly be cold.
“The very first Star denied herself everything so that she could be a beacon of light for others. Her name was Mary Whitman and she was a slave.”
Herod gasped at this. We were Negroes, it was true, but we were all Northern Negroes, born of at least two generations of freed men. Those with slavery closer to them than that kept it hidden. The first Emancipation Day was nearly forty years past. Slaves were the Israelites in the Bible, they were the figures drawn in quick blurry clouds of black ink in the illustrated editions of Uncle Tom’s Cabin we read in school. Though we understood that some of us were once them, and that we had to bake cakes every church bazaar for those down who were still pretty much them, it never occurred to us as children that slaves could live in Spring City, Massachusetts, any more than camels could.
“Yes,” Mumma said. “She was a slave and she ran away and came here to the North. But in order to run, she had to deny herself everything. She had to deny herself love. She had a mother and father and husband and little babies and she had to leave them behind. She had to deny herself love. And she ran and she ran and when she came here, when she came to the North, she was so full of light from her trials that she became a Star. And she began this sisterhood, to teach other Negro women how to shine like her. Because in order for the Negro race to survive and thrive, we need a hundred stars, a thousand stars, full of light to show others the way.”
Mumma rested against the table and I heard the wood groan and just a whiff, just the tiniest hint, of melted butter filled the air.
“Not everyone can be a Star,” she continued. “Not everyone can be so strong as to deny themselves to make sure the Negro race survives. But we believe you Infant Stars have the potential to become Stars of the Morning.”
And here, Mumma gestured to Miss Dora, who brought her a wooden-backed chair, which Mumma sat down on, arranged her skirts, made herself comfortable, and I cannot remember the rest of the speech from that night, because my attention was taken up with keeping my lips pressed tight together and sucking hard on my own tongue to keep from standing up, pushing my own mother aside, and lapping up the mounds of potatoes stacked behind her.
Later, when we were leaving Initiation, my stomach full, Mumma said, “I wish you hadn’t picked Nymphadora for your name. It’s just not right.”
“I like it.” I could still taste a bit the turnip greens’ juice on my lips.
“Yes,” she said. “I suppose it’s pretty.” She sighed. “I was hoping you’d have a more sober name. Like Joshua or David.”
Mumma’s star name was Job. She was so, so, proud of that name, of its rectitude and serendipity. Choosing that name confirmed to her that she was born to be a Star. And if she was meant to be a Star, then me, made in her image, must be destined to be one too.
She straightened and peered ahead of us int
o the dark. We were walking along the short stretch of Main Street. All around us was night and Mumma and I kept our eyes out for the blazing lantern that hung from the sign of our store.
Mumma took my hand in the dark. “It wasn’t you that picked Nymphadora,” she said. “It was Providence.” And then I knew that this was grave, because Mumma didn’t like to get religious unless the situation absolutely warranted it. She accepted it as the will of the universe that my Star name should be so scandalous. She decided, “There’s a reason for it. Only time will tell us what it is.”
I THINK MY name, its rowdiness, I think it all was leading to Dr. Gardner and what he asked me to do, and what I agreed to do, and I know it would kill her all over again if she knew. Sometimes I can’t help exercising the perverse logic that maybe Dr. Gardner’s friendship is part of the Providence Mumma believed in so heartily. As soon as I think it, I feel the cynicism so fiercely, like a sharp pain in my eyetooth. And then I make the pain keener when I remember that, in the end, even Mumma herself had given up on Providence.
She and Pop left me behind. I was not even in the house with them when they killed themselves. Mumma sent me out on what I know now to be a fool’s errand: she told me the undertaker needed some tincture immediately and sent me to his house far from the center of town, knowing it would take me nearly an hour to walk there and back. While I was arguing with Mr. Dawes over the tincture—he insisted he had not ordered it and I insisted he must have, because Mumma and Pop never made mistakes—they drank their secret drink.
Mr. Dawes called me a batty old girl, and while I drew myself up in my patent leather boots and huffed away from him and did my best to make a dramatic exit from his lane, Mumma and Pop sat in their seats by the fire and they seized and shook and raged in their chairs. By the time I came home and found an envelope tacked to our front door with my name on it, written in Mumma’s hand, it was done.
I took the envelope, already knowing something was wrong, and opened the door with one hand while slitting its top with the other. I called their names as I unfolded the note, not even really reading it, walking to the parlor where I found the two of them. Their death jitters had thrown them from their seats. Pop was curled around the feet of his armchair and Mumma was laid out, five-pointed, in the middle of the throw rug.
We Love You, Charlie Freeman: A Novel Page 3