“We’re going to Mother Fletcher’s for dinner,” Meaghan said brightly.
“You’re not going to Mother Fletcher’s, Kathy. And that’s that!”
“Well, then I suggest you arrest me, Mr. O’Brien.” The sunlight through the window caught the flare in Kathy’s eyes. “Because that will be the only way you’re going to prevent our going.”
“I brought her a scarf.” Meaghan held a small square package.
“What is this all about?” Bill felt his face getting red. “You don’t even know this woman. Why do you have to drag Meaghan all the way to Harlem?”
“I’m not dragging her anywhere. I’m giving her the present of a visit to an old lady that even you like. Now, from what you say, all I have to do is to go over to the neighborhood and ask anyone where she lives because they all know, right? Or would you like to drop us off?”
The silence of the long drive was broken only by an occasional observation from Meaghan. O’Brien took his wife slowly, carefully, through the worst streets he could find until he finally pulled up in front of Mother Fletcher’s place.
“Well, well, well!” Mother Fletcher was wearing an ankle-length green dress with a white lace collar. She wore a red and gold pin shaped like a tree. “I thought I was going to be having Christmas dinner by myself this year.” Bill shot a glance in Kathy’s direction as they entered the small apartment. The smell of the ham in the oven filled the room.
“Mother Fletcher, this is my wife, Kathy, and this is Meaghan.”
“Well, ain’t she the prettiest little thing. Look just like her mama, too. Sit on down in here while I see if I can’t get something together for dinner. Did I wish you a Merry Christmas yet? Merry Christmas, children.”
“Merry Christmas, and here’s a present.” Meaghan gave Mother Fletcher the package.
“Thank you, child,” Mother Fletcher said.
“Daddy didn’t want to come,” Meaghan said, pulling off her coat.
“I just didn’t want to put you out,” Bill said quickly.
“Child, I don’t blame you one bit,” Mother Fletcher said. “You working here all week and then coming back on a holiday. But it’s good for you to see we have holidays here, too. You see the people in the street all wishing each other a Merry Christmas and dressed up in their churchgoing clothes. You see them in this frame and you get a different picture of them. Don’t you think so, Officer?”
“Yeah, I guess you’re right,” Bill answered.
“You can take your coat off,” Mother Fletcher said. “I’ll put it in a safe place.”
“Those plates are so lovely!” Kathy went to the kitchen table where three plates were set out. “Are they antiques?”
“Everything in this house is an antique, including me,” Mother Fletcher said as she took another plate from the cabinet.
“It’s a lovely setting and there sure are a lot of pots on the stove for you not to be expecting anyone.”
“Well, honey, let me tell you something. You don’t survive, and that’s what I been doing all these years, you don’t survive sitting around expecting folks to act right.” She opened the oven door, poked a fork in the ham and watched the clear juices run down its side, and then closed it. “ ’Cause the more you expect the more you get your heart broke up. But you got to be ready when they do act right because that’s what makes the surviving worth surviving. That make any sense to you, honey?”
“It makes quite a bit of sense.”
“That child of yours eat sweet potatoes?”
“Yes, she loves them,” Kathy said. “Can I help you with anything?”
“You can help me with anything you have a mind to,” Mother Fletcher said. “Bout time you asked me, too, old as I am.”
“You’re not as old as Santa Claus,” volunteered Meaghan.
“Santa Claus?” Mother Fletcher put down the dish towel and turned her head to one side. “Child, I knew Santa Claus when he wasn’t nothing but a little fellow. Let’s see now. He wasn’t any bigger than you when I knew him. Me and him used to play catch down near the school yard.”
And Mother Fletcher went off into telling stories to Meaghan about how long she had known Santa Claus and how she used to have to lend him her handkerchief because his nose was always running.
And the Christmas dinner wasn’t the best that the O’Briens would ever have but it was far from being the worst. But then, that’s not what this story is about. This story is about how a policeman’s young family brought a few hours of happiness to an old woman. Or perhaps it’s about how an old woman taught a young family something about sharing. Or maybe, just maybe, it is about how a six-year-old girl found the only person in the world who played catch with Santa Claus when he was a little boy, even though she was a lot older than he was.
Part I Doll
Big Time Henson stood on the stoop in front of 171 West 145th Street and thought about what he had to do. There were three flights to climb to Miss Pat’s house. The old woman would be awake now, thinking about going shopping as she did each afternoon. She’d ask him to go with her downtown to La Marketa and he would say no, and then she would tell him about things that happened back in the day when La Marketa would be filled with fresh food just brought in to the city and fresh fish laid out neatly on beds of cracked ice.
“You could smell the spices as soon as you got off the trolley,” she would say.
As soon as you got off the trolley. The nut-brown woman had probably been beautiful when she was young, Big Time thought. He imagined his great-grandmother, smartly dressed, walking through the streets of Harlem. Big Time couldn’t imagine trolleys on 125th Street, but he would nod his approval and wait on the edge of his world until she had exhausted her stories and then he would ask her to lend him a few dollars.
On the way up the stairs he began to feel sick. Once he stopped and took deep breaths, trying to calm himself down, trying to get himself into the role that he had to play. It was no use. By the time he reached her floor he realized that it was too late for anything but to ask her up front for the money.
“You’re looking thin,” Miss Pat said. “Are you eating enough?”
“I’m eating enough,” Big Time said.
“You know when you were real little they used to call you Penny.” Miss Pat took Ritz crackers from the closet and put them on the table. “I don’t know how you got to be called Big Time. Penny and Big Time aren’t even close. I don’t like nicknames anyway.”
“So you think you can spare a few dollars?” Big Time wiped away a thin edge of sweat from his upper lip.
“Have I ever told you about a woman named Doll in our family history?” She sat down in front of the refrigerator, her hands folded on the edge of the table.
“Who’s Doll?” he asked. He had asked. She hadn’t said no.
“Doll was a slave woman,” Miss Pat said. “She was on a plantation down near Montgomery. She had two children and she had a man she loved, but they weren’t married because the slaves couldn’t get married like the white folks could.”
“You think you could lend me the money?” Waves of nausea hit him. He sucked air through his clenched teeth.
“The whites lived in the plantation house, they used to call it the Big House,” Miss Pat went on. “And the coloreds lived about a quarter mile in back of the plantation house in a little row of shacks they called the Quarters. When I was a student at Talladega College, me and Edward, your great-grandfather, went over to see the plantation. You know he was a great one for studying history. Did you know that?”
“Yeah, I remember,” Big Time answered. “Okay if I open the window?”
“Sure, baby, I know how the heat can get to you sometimes.”
The window was already partially opened and he pulled it all the way up. In the street below some boys were playing basketball using a milk crate as a hoop. Some older men were playing dominoes. Young men stood on the corner, as they always did, watching.
“So what happene
d to Doll?” he said, hoping to hurry the story.
“Doll didn’t live in the Quarters with the other coloreds,” Miss Pat said. “She lived in a little room in back of the kitchen in the Big House. What she did was to help the master’s wife around the house. And things went all right as far as it went, with Doll not being free and everything. The master was an old man and he did pretty good. They raised cotton and hogs on that plantation. You want something to eat?”
“No,” Big Time said. “I’m not hungry.”
“Then things got hard,” Miss Pat went on. “I don’t know why. I guess that’s the way the farming business goes. And the master started selling his slaves.”
“Things were hard,” Big Time said. He glanced up at the square clock on the wall over the stove. It was two-thirty. Sweet Jimmy would be back from downtown with a pocketful of Dimes.
“When Doll saw he was selling his people, she went to him and begged him not to sell her,” Miss Pat said. “You know, when they sold them from Alabama and they went down to Mississippi it was really hard on them. And then they would be separated from people they knew, other colored people.
“So the master promised he wouldn’t sell Doll. But one day a speculator came by—you know what a speculator was?”
“No, look, I have to go,” Big Time said, standing.
“Well, I’m sorry you couldn’t spend more time with me today,” Miss Pat said, folding her hands in her lap.
There was a calmness in her voice, an evenness of tone that Big Time recognized. She knew he was sick.
“Can you lend me the money?” he asked again.
“A speculator was one of those people who went from plantation to plantation looking for slaves they could buy,” Miss Pat said.
Big Time sat down. Street noises drifted up from the street. The roar of buses. A fire engine’s wail. Snatches of music.
“The master had sold about as many slaves as he could sell without having to shut down his farming,” Miss Pat said. “And so when the speculator came by, the slaves that were left thought they were pretty safe.
“They were out in the fields working when all of a sudden a young black girl came running out across the field. ‘Master is selling the children!’ she shouted. Well, you can imagine what the reaction was to that. They’re out in the field working and the speculator is ready to take off their children. That’s how cruel slavery times were.
“The women in the field started back toward the Big House. The overseer tried to stop them. He hit at them with his whip and tried to block them but they were determined. You know, those women loved their children. Just because a person was a slave didn’t mean they didn’t have the same feelings as everybody else.
“Anyway, they all got to the Big House just as the speculator was putting the children on his wagon to carry them off. Oh, they begged and they pleaded and they pleaded and they begged. The children he was selling were too young to know what was going on but when they saw their mamas crying they began to cry, too. But the master wasn’t listening. Now, they said he wasn’t a particularly cruel man, if you can believe that, but he had just fallen on hard times and he had done what he had done and he wasn’t backing up. Doll, I guess she’d be your great-great-great-grandmother, something like that, went to her mistress and begged her, knowing that another woman would understand how she felt.
“What Doll begged her to do is just to let her hold her babies in her arms once more before they went off. She knew once they went off with the speculator she wouldn’t see them again. The mistress of the plantation liked Doll and said she could say good-bye to her boys but she had to do it quick because the speculator didn’t have much time to waste. He was taking the children into Montgomery. The mistress told Doll that the children would all go to good homes and be raised as house servants.
“Doll thanked her mistress and took her babies into the cabin she stayed in and she hugged them boys and hugged them and kissed them and told them how much she loved them.
“After a while the speculator got itchy and said he had to move on and the mistress sent another slave woman into Doll’s cabin to get the children. When the woman came out she didn’t go up to the mistress but just started walking out to the fields. The mistress called to her and threatened to have her beat good but the woman didn’t turn back. Finally the mistress went into Doll’s cabin herself to see what was going on.
“When she got into the cabin she saw Doll was still holding the boys in her arms and rocking them. The mistress went up to Doll to tell her that she must let the children go. That’s when she saw the blood.”
Miss Pat got up from the table and went to the cupboard. She moved aside a box of tea bags and brought out a small purse.
“It wasn’t usual for women to kill their children during slavery times,” Miss Pat said. “But it happened. I think it was something that stayed on their minds a lot even when they wouldn’t do it. You know, looking at your child and being filled up with love and at the same time knowing that it was going to be a slave all its life must have been so hard.”
“She killed them?”
“Sometimes you got to get your freedom the best way you can,” Miss Pat said.
“What happened to Doll?” Big Time said. “She get free?”
“She got whipped,” Miss Pat said. “That’s the story that was handed down. And you know what?”
“What?”
“Sometimes when I think about that story you know what I think about?” Miss Pat took seven dollars from the money she had and put it down in front of Big Time. “I don’t think about them children dying, which is what you think I would think about. I think about how Doll must have felt being whipped. Isn’t that funny? I just think about her being tied down and that overseer or whoever it was doing the whipping trying to hurt her. You think there’s just so much pain you can put on a person?”
Big Time said he didn’t know. He tried to think about Doll, about how she must have felt, but his thoughts had already moved away.
“I can’t even imagine trolleys on 125th Street,” he said, instantly recognizing the heavy awkwardness of what he was saying.
“Well, it was a long time ago,” Miss Pat answered.
When Big Time reached the street a man was arguing with a policeman while a tow truck hooked up his car. Big Time watched for a long moment, then started toward the avenue. He told himself that he would have to remember the story she had told him about Doll in case she asked him again.
Part II Sweet Jimmy
Sweet Jimmy ran his thing behind where the old bicycle shop used to be before the landlord busted it down. He always had two heavies sitting in front of the place and two pit bulls to keep the Man off his case. The Man could collar the heavies but if they did they would just let the dogs loose and the bust would be wacked out.
Big Time showed green and went past the heavies. Inside the front room a couple of dudes were watching a talk show on television.
“Yo, Sonny, what’s up?”
“Ain’t nothing going on,” Big Time answered to his tag. “You just chilling?”
“Yeah, something like that,” Fish said. “You should check out these Snow Whites on the tube, man. They each got two boyfriends and they messing with both of them.”
“That’s the thing,” Big Time said. “You think you’re playing a babe and they’re playing you.”
“Word. But I wouldn’t go on no television and let the world know about it, man,” Fish said.
“You would if they offered you some Presidents.” Big Time didn’t know the other dude. “You can cop the money and then let the babes walk.”
“Yeah, I hear you,” Big Time said. He was feeling sick again. “Sweet Jimmy in the back?”
“Yeah.”
Big Time stepped through the curtain that separated the front room from the back. It was dark and he stood in the doorway trying to get his eyes right and knowing he wouldn’t. There was a radio on and somebody was flowing strong but Big Time couldn’t
figure out who it was.
“Yo, Sweet Jimmy, what’s happening?”
“You are if you’re righteous.” Sweet Jimmy’s voice came from the corner.
Big Time squinted and found Sweet Jimmy’s shape. He went over to him and took out the small wad of bills he had counted over and over again in Miss Pat’s hallway. Sweet Jimmy looked at the bills, counted them out, then threw them into a cardboard box.
Sweet Jimmy handed Big Time the syringe and said something that Big Time didn’t quite catch.
What he told himself was that he was going to wait it out. Stay away from the tracks and just skin pop. Hold off the nausea and mellow out slow. He was down with the easy way.
“You need help?”
Big Time looked up and saw the kid that Sweet Jimmy let hang around. The kid could find a vein in the dark if you needed that kind of help.
“Ain’t going there,” Big Time said.
He found a chair against the wall, sat down, took a deep breath, and then slid the point of the needle under the skin on the inside of his wrist. He hoped the stuff wasn’t weak. Sweet Jimmy wasn’t known for weak stuff. Sweet Jimmy was straight, which was why so many people turned to Sweet Jimmy when they needed to get right.
“Yo, Sonny,” Sweet Jimmy called from across the room. “Are you down with the S.A.T.?”
“Yeah, I’m down,” Big Time said.
“My sister is looking to take the S.A.T. again,” Sweet Jimmy said. “She got to get a scholarship to get into this school she wants to make up in Boston, man.”
“You can’t carry the weight?” Big Time asked.
“She’s doing her Snow White thing,” Sweet Jimmy came back. “You know, walking away from the ’hood and the good.”
“Yeah, I know what you mean.” Big Time felt himself flushing, felt the drugs flooding through his body, felt himself easing into that state in which he just didn’t care about anything. He relaxed into the chair that Sweet Jimmy had provided, and struggled to stay alert.
Sweet Jimmy’s voice was, at the same time, bouncing around his head and coming from a distance.
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