Edward Jones - All Aunt Hagar's Children

Iwas never to return to kindergarten. Gradually, as I waited for my mother that first day in Sister Mary Frances Moriarty’s first-grade class, I took my eyes from the clock because the slowness of the minute hand was beginning to hurt my heart. I looked about without moving my head. Sister was printing the letter “P” on the blackboard. Taking up her pointer from the tray at the board, she turned and pointed at the beginning of the line of letters. The students began to recite the alphabet.

At the letter “D,” I joined in. I had nothing better to do. My father had taught me the alphabet when I was two. On a blackboard of a million words, I could pick out my name. At the letter “H,” Sister Mary Frances looked at me, the third-week kindergarten student. At “J,” she told the class to hush. She aimed the pointer at me. “Only you,” she said, and pointed to the letter “A.” I recited the alphabet as she pointed. When she came to “P,” the last one she had printed, we stopped. There were cards of the whole alphabet along the top of the board, and I raised my hand up to the letter “Q,” which was a foot or so to the right of the clock. I pointed to each letter all the way to “Z.” I was tempted to do more, to point all about and name them out of order, the way my father had taught me. For my father, the letter “M,” for example, had no life if it only existed between “L” and “N.”

Sister returned the pointer to the tray. Whatever she was thinking, it was not on her face. She came down the aisle toward me, her hands behind her back, her beads gently swaying. The door opened, and I saw Miss Sadie with Mother Superior, the principal. Sister went to them. Miss Sadie’s eyes found me and she raised her hand Hello. I raised my hand Hello. The nuns were saying something to Miss Sadie but her eyes never left me. The wife of One-Eye Jack had no time for white people.

“They treat you right?” she asked as we walked home. She told me that after my sister Delores had fallen off the couch, and a big knot had appeared on her forehead, my mother had run up with her and Eva both in the carriage to Sibley Hospital on Pierce Street. Knots on the body terrified my mother, and she had momentarily forgotten about me waiting for her at school. “They treat you right?” Miss Sadie asked again after we had turned off 1st Street onto L.

Sister Mary Frances had seen something, and so kindergarten, she told my mother the next morning, would not be enough for me. First grade and even second grade might not even be enough. My mother was happy, but my father saw something he didn’t like in my skipping a grade only three weeks after I started school. “Watch out when white folks wanna do somethin for you, cause it ain’t gonna be pretty,” he said as they talked in bed after my sisters and I were asleep. My mother prevailed.

They gave me two weeks to get a uniform, and so good-bye to all my Philadelphia uncle’s beautiful dresses. I was given the same seat of that first afternoon. I learned that my seat had once belonged to a boy who was gone now. I had the seat in front of a boy named Lawrence Wilson. I was to the left of Sylvia Carstairs, who liked to look at me and flutter her eyelashes as if imparting some coded message. “You wanna be my best friend?” Sylvia whispered my third day in first grade. I had no great mission in life at that point, and so I nodded. “Friends for life, right?” she whispered and flashed the eyelashes. I had the seat to the right of Herman Franks, who quietly hummed all the day long. I was behind Regina Bristol, who had the darkest and the most perfect skin of anyone I had ever known. Angels in my dreams had such skin.

“You know what?” Sylvia said not long after we became friends for life. We were jumping rope with three other girls at recess, and Sylvia was standing beside me as I turned the rope, waiting for one girl to miss so Sylvia could get a go. She was whispering, the way she did in class. “Regina got a boyfriend.” I looked Sylvia full in the face as the news settled over me. My father liked to call himself my mother’s boyfriend, but a boy, not a man, as a boyfriend was quite new to me. “Am I still your boyfriend?” my father would ask my mother, putting his lips to her neck as she stood at the stove. Sylvia pointed to a boy who was playing tag. In class, that boy sat two seats up and to the left of me. He, like most of the children in class those first days, was only a uniform. Now, as Sylvia whispered, he started to exist whole and unto himself. He was skinnier than the son of One-Eye Jack and not half as handsome as Regina was beautiful. On a purple shelf in my imagination, Regina and her tag-playing boyfriend took their places and stood straight, holding hands, like two figures plucked from a wedding cake. “I think they gon get married one day,” Sylvia said. The girl jumping rope had been going for a little more than two minutes. “My boyfriend forever,” my mother would say at the stove and turn to kiss my father. I could see Regina across the way on the kindergarten bench, her legs crossed, her arms folded, talking to another girl. Then, as if to emphasize what Sylvia was saying about them, the boyfriend stopped playing tag and waved vigorously and desperately to Regina as if from far, far away. Finally, Regina raised her hand to him and lowered it quickly and went back to talking. “See,” Sylvia said. “They gon get married in a big church,” and she raised her arms to indicate the bigness of the church.

I chanted with the other girls as the jumping girl went on through the third minute:

I’m happy, you’re happy

At last, the jumping girl stumbled and Sylvia moved to take her place. The girl took the rope from me, and I waited my turn. Sylvia jumped high, higher than all of us. We had good sun that day. Regina uncrossed and then recrossed her legs, keeping her knees very much together, the way a woman of the world did without thinking. The girl she was talking to seemed to have something important to say, and that girl punctured the air with her forefinger to make certain Regina got her point.

I’m happy, you’re happy

Go tell Mama, go tell Pappy

We went on in the different suns down through September and up into the days of October. My father’s corn that fall was not what he would have liked, but the peaches from the small tree in the northeast corner of the backyard did well by him. My mother sliced up some and put cream on them and allowed me and Delores to eat them. She had enough left over to make a cobbler for my father’s father.

Aside from the days at school, my life was not different in ways I noticed. My sister Delores, though, had become emboldened while I was away and seemed to think that all the toys I possessed belonged to her. I would come home from school and most of my things would be in her toy box. The only weapon I had was to tell her that I was going to school and she was not. Saying this to her made her blink to the verge of tears, and she would go out of our room and I would be free to reclaim my things.

Three years after my grandmother and my father and my aunts arrived in Washington, my grandmother—in the year she bought her first tourist home to house black travelers not allowed in white hotels—married a man who had never taken a drink in his life. He had three filling stations, one in Northeast and two in Northwest, and he had a big house in Anacostia that stood strong against the wind. With all his soul, this man wanted my father to see him as his father and to love him, but my father would have none of that. Then my father, at seventeen, began to change. He had witnessed the man bathing and feeding and caring for my grandmother that year she took a horrible sick; it was too late, for the man, Grandpa Peter, having suffered year after year in my father’s awful light, had tried to save himself by closing his heart to my father.