Edward Jones - All Aunt Hagar's Children

For the three weeks I was in Holy Redeemer’s kindergarten, my mother always picked me up at noon, as kindergarten was only half a day. She usually left my two younger sisters at home with Miss Sadie. Sadie’s son Jack went to Walker-Jones and would come to our house for his lunch. Sometimes, on the nicest days, my mother would put her youn gest, Eva, in the carriage and have her middle girl, Delores, walk alongside. Delores, at three, was picking up bits and pieces of Spanish from my mother and the two of them would gabber in what a stranger to Spanish would have thought was real conversation.

It was on a particularly fine day in late September that I waited in the playground for my mother, standing near the kindergarten door, mildly interested in the children from the upper grades running and ripping about. My own classmates and the teacher had all gone. My mother had never been late before, and because of the world my parents had made for me, I was not afraid.

About one o’clock, the nuns had each class line up. All the children were in uniform, the girls in blue jumpers and white blouses, the boys in blue pants and white shirts. The school was in the shape of an upside-down “L,” with my kindergarten door at one end and the door to all the other grades at the other. In moments, everyone had gone through the other door and I was alone in the playground.

I sat down on the bench under the kindergarten windows, still not at all worried. Somewhere in our world my mother was making her way to me, with or without her other two children. And as time moved on past one o’clock, as I edged toward concern, she was joined in my mind by my father and then by both my grandfathers and my mother’s people and all my father’s people, all of them coming to get me. So I hummed, and then I made up a song about that lady in Mexico who spoke Spanish in the morning the way my mother did. The lady in Mexico was standing in the road with her hand shading her eyes, watching her children skip toward her.

A little after one thirty a priest came from the other end of the playground, hurrying to the door to the rest of the school. Midway he happened to look toward me. He paused, no doubt surprised to see a child alone in the playground. Kindergarten children did not wear uniforms. The priest raised his hand Hello. I raised my hand Hello and after a moment the priest went on.

I was getting worried. I grew bored with singing and started to count the birds flying over. In one category, the pretty princesses’ category, I put the birds that I saw land in the trees, and in another category, the evil witches’ category, I put the birds that never landed. I could see my father and mother and the dozens and dozens of people in my life waiting at a traffic light, still on their way to me. The red light took too long and they looked both ways and did what I was warned never to do—they crossed against it. The birds stopped flying and I took to inspecting the hem of my dress.

It was more than twenty minutes before the priest came out the door and started back across the playground. He paused midway again, looking at me. He turned and went back through the door and soon returned with a nun. The nun motioned for me to come to them, and in the time it took for a bird to fly over, it was decided between them that I should wait for my tribe in that nun’s first-grade class.

The nun was white, and except for the wooden beads clucking at her side, she moved silently down the hall. I heard singing and talking children in the classrooms as we walked. I heard nothing from her class as we approached, and when we entered, all the faces turned to us. My unease was extreme because now I was so far from the spot upon which my mother had ordered me to stay put. But I said nothing. In four rows, front to back, the class had twenty-two or so students, and they were all colored. I alone had no uniform but was arrayed in a yellow Garfinckel’s dress. I was given the penultimate seat in one of the middle rows. Sister began the lesson where she had left off, and I, needing to be elsewhere, watched the clock in the front of the room because it was easier than looking at heads and a room and a nun I would not see again.

Before they left South Carolina for Washington when my father was eight years old, my grandmother kept reminding him and his sisters not to waste time. “Time’s a wastin,” she would say if they lingered in packing in the days before they left that Monday morning. It had been more than a week since they had last seen my grandfather. They heard rumors that he was about, around, but while my father would go in search of him, my grandmother set about discarding her old life as if her husband was not in the world. Her decision to leave South Carolina had come three weeks before they left, when my grandmother awoke alone in her bed and pulled back the covers and looked down at how still perfectly made up was the place where her husband should have been sleeping. Something in the very perfection of his place in the bed told her that she did not love my grandfather anymore. That particular morning my grandfather was asleep on some fallen magnolia leaves in a little forest not far from their cabin, where he had dropped in the night on his way home. The second my grandmother pulled back the bedcovers, her husband raised his head, as heavy as John Henry’s anvil, and for several moments he tossed off the aftermath of his drunkenness, because his world had shuddered and he had been disturbed in his sleep and did not know why.

“Time’s wastin. Time’s wastin.” She gave away what furniture she could not sell, gradually leaving the cabin empty of everything but my grandfather’s clothes, such as they were.

My father had no heart for any of it, for leaving their old piece of a home and his shadow of a father. He moped, he refused to put things in the heavy pasteboard suitcases my grandmother had collected. He said bad words and did not care if his mother heard him.

The evening before they left, my grandmother sat on the last chair they possessed, counting the money a man had given her for their chifforobe. For the seventh time that evening, my father shuffled by her, cursing under his breath. His mother grabbed his arm, startling him. “Ain’t I told you bout that?” she screamed. “Ain’t I?” His sisters came in from outside and stood watching.

“I ain’t goin no D.C.,” my father said. There was a good reason why my grandmother would sometimes see his face in the near darkness and think it her father’s ghost.

My grandmother took his shirt in both hands and lifted him up on his tiptoes, the way a strong man might do a lesser man.

“I’ll run away from that D.C. and come back down here to Daddy.” My father began to cry.

My grandmother considered his face, his body. “I’ll catch you,” she said at last, her face so close to his that he had no choice but to breathe the air she expelled. “No matter what, I’ll catch you.” She raised him up higher with one hand and slapped him. She waited while his whole body registered what she had done, then she slapped him twice more. “I’ll catch you and tie you to a bed till you a grown man. And every day I’ll beat you. Beat all the black off you, boy. Beat you every day of your no-count life.” She released my father, and he crumpled to the floor. My aunts had not moved from the doorway. My grandmother stood up. She took the money she had been counting off the table and put it in her bosom as she stepped over my father.

When I was two and a half years old, my father sat me on his lap and we spent part of an afternoon going through his Life magazines. In one there was an article on proletarian art in the Soviet Union. In my imagination my grandmother and my father and my aunts were to become like the statue in a picture in that article. There was a road that southern people took to get to Washington, and on that road there were the four of them. My grandmother had one hand pointing ahead. She wore a bonnet and a long pioneer-woman dress. My two aunts, each carrying a bundle, were looking to where she was pointing, and their hands were shading their eyes like that lady in Mexico waiting for her children. One of my father’s hands was in my grandmother’s hand, lest he run away, and his other hand was pointing back, a boy frozen in photograph-gray.