John Sayles - A Moment in the Sun

“You think it’s likely to come to this?” he asks.

“It might and it might not,” says Mr. Kenan. “But we’ll sleep better just knowing it’s here.”

“You have ruined us.”

Yolanda has seen him angrier than this, furious over some defiance on Junior’s part, some pointed slight at a Council meeting, but never so cold.

“You understand that, don’t you? You understand what you’ve done?”

Her daughter stands before him, chest heaving with sobs, near hysteria since he began his relentless questioning of her symptoms. He has not touched her, and Yolanda can tell that she is not yet allowed to.

“I was going to tell you earlier,” Jessie manages to say between sobs for breath, “but I wasn’t sure.”

“Sure of what? There is no question about your relations with that boy—”

“But that doesn’t mean—”

“So you think your behavior would be acceptable if there hadn’t been this consequence?”

Yolanda wishes he would stop. Her daughter’s girlhood is shattered, that is all that matters now.

“I see this sort of behavior every day across the tracks,” he says. “I expect it from those people. But in my own family—” He is shaking his head now, eyes fixed with censure on Jessie. He is not a man to hurl objects, not a man to kick and curse. She knows he is gentle with the other ones, the fallen girls he treats north of Red Cross Street, she knows from the way they smile and proudly show off their fatherless infants when encountered on the street. But this is their daughter, their jewel, their gift to the world.

“How could you do such a thing?”

It isn’t shame she hears in her husband’s voice, though public shame is certainly on his mind. It isn’t shock or disappointment or even the fear of how this will be used against him, against them all, that she senses in his tone.

He is jealous.

“I’ll write to him,” Jessie sobs. “Or if you let me, I’ll go to him—”

His smile, his pride, walking arm in arm with her, showing her off to the world—

“The next time I see that boy,” he says, “will be his last day on earth.”

He walked that way with her once, Yolanda, when she was his young wife, but time passes and daughters love their fathers and fathers return that love—

Jessie runs and throws herself on the divan, covering her head with her arms, wailing. Yolanda takes a step but he stops her with his eyes.

“It’s that white woman,” he fumes. “Filling her head with scandal.”

“She’s a piano teacher.”

“And a Suffragist.”

“You’ve never had a problem with—”

“It isn’t the voting, it’s everything else that goes along with it!” He is pacing now, pointedly looking away from Jessie, pacing the way he does when he returns from the city meetings and condemns the latest outrages. “The father is practically an anarchist.”

“You know that isn’t true.”

“And that boy—”

“His name is Royal.”

“His name,” says her husband, raising his voice so Jessie can hear over her sobs, “will never be spoken in this house again!”

It is easier, it must be, for the rest of them, the people north of the tracks. Nobody is watching them, nobody hoping for them to fall. And there are women there, midwives and roots women, who can erase an indiscretion if engaged in time. More than once he has spoken of having them arrested, but never made a formal complaint. And some just have the child, acknowledging the father whether he reciprocates or not. Easier, yes, but no option for a decent Christian girl.

“I’ll write to his commanding officer,” he says, “and have him discharged.”

“And what purpose will that serve?” says Yolanda. She is amazed to feel so calm. It is the same calm that came over her when Junior went under at Lake Waccamaw and she was the one to pull him out, the one to flip him on his stomach and work his arms and squeeze his little ribs till the water was forced out and he took his first gasping breath. Jessie is making those sounds now on the divan, drowning in her misery, but Yolanda is calm and already thinking ahead to what can be done. What must be done. The worry will come later, as it did with Junior, trembling every time he came near the water after that, her first thought when he announced his enlistment the anxious relief that, thank the Lord, he had not signed on to be a sailor.

“We need to be strong now,” she says. “We need to think very clearly.”

Jessie is weeping more quietly, having made her last effort and eager to hear what fate will be decided for her. Dr. Lunceford stops pacing, turns to face his wife. We have been so fortunate, she thinks. I will not allow this to destroy us. Jessie has been foolish and weak but not wicked, never that, and what they’ve planned for her is gone. But there will be no tragedy. We have endured worse than this in our lives, she thinks. And then, with the tiniest guilty twinge of excitement — there will be a new baby.

Her husband begins to pace again, but now his eyes are inward, calculating, his step the measured stride that always follows his diatribes.

“We find a husband,” he says. “Immediately.” He shoots a look to Yolanda before she can raise the possibility. “Someone respectable.”

Alma sits on the stairs, waiting for the storm to pass. Her own father had taken his belt to her the first time and for a while she blamed him. The next she lost before she was showing much and by the third he was out of their lives. That was the story with railroad men, her mama said, they went off down the tracks and one day didn’t come back.

Dr. Lunceford uses suspenders to keep his pants up and she’s never known him to raise a hand to any of his family. Not like the Judge, thrash his arm stiff whipping his younger boy’s behind, and him, Niles, only waiting for it to end and taking no lesson from the punishment. The last fight was the worst, with blows exchanged and blood on the rug and her in the middle of it.

And now little Jessie down there sobbing like she’s got it hard.

Alma hurries back up to their bedroom when the girl’s begging loses steam, when Doctor’s plans are fixed and Mrs. Lunceford stays quiet. Alma finishes making their bed, sheets smelling the tiniest bit of smoke from the fire over on Castle Street the day she hung them out, and she hears Jessie running up and slamming the door to her room.

She waits till it is clear Mrs. Lunceford won’t be following, still reasoning with Doctor down the stairs. She steps in without knocking. The girl is sprawled on her belly, exhausted from crying. Alma sits on the edge of the bed. It is a long moment before Jessie pulls her face out of the pillow and stares, red-eyed, toward the window.

“Did you hear?”

“I heard.”

“They won’t let me have him.”

“You didn’t tell him before this? Write to him?”

“I wasn’t sure.”

“I told you, girl—”

“You’re not a doctor.”

“I aint a farm girl, neither,” says Alma, “but I know when a melon is set to bust.” She puts a hand on Jessie’s shoulder, tries to remember being this young. By the time she got shoes, ten, maybe eleven, she knew enough not to hope for things. You try to get what you can out of life, but only white folks and the few there is like the Luncefords, the educated colored, bother to make big plans and expect them to work out.

“ Can’t spen’ what you ain’ got ,” her mama always said, “ and can’t lose what you ain’ never had .”

“What you gone do now?”

“What can I do?”

“That boy want you. That’s all you been tellin me—”

“He’s in the Army.”

“So? Texas somewhere—”