Edward Jones - All Aunt Hagar's Children

The next morning I came out of sleep to a thump on one of the bottom stairs. My father cleaned those steps until they shined like crystal. There was another thump. I sat up and began to realize what the sound was. I waited and wiggled my toes under the covers. “This little piggy wants some corn. This little piggy says, ‘Where you gon get it from?’ This little piggy says, ‘Outa Massa’s barn…’” When I was done with that foot, I started on the other. There came a thump. “This little pig says, ‘Run go tell!’” I came to the end on that foot and raised my left hand to my forehead. A Band-Aid covered the wound I suffered when I fell at my desk. There was another thump. I thought about the scab that would form and wondered if I would have a scar as big as the one on a boy I knew who had gotten hit in the forehead with a sharp rock. Children called him Rock Head because he had managed to live. Would people now call me Miss Rock Head, or would they have to come up with another name? There was a thump. “This little pig says, ‘Twee, twee, twee, I’ll tell old Massa, tell old Massa!’” Finally, all the thumps stopped, but my grandfather did not appear. I learned much later that he stood in the hall in those moments after the climb, straightening his tie and wiping the sweat from his face, preparing to come in.

Sister Mary Frances rearranged our seating, and I found myself in the last aisle, next to a window. In the curious alphabet of our lives, I sat behind Herman Franks. He continued on with his quiet humming. He would smell a mimeographed page, and he would hum. He hummed to scratch his head. He hummed to hear the song of a bird drifting into the room. The boy, the boyfriend, was gone when I returned, and I never saw him again. The curious alphabet of our lives still placed Sylvia Carstairs, my best friend for life, beside me. “Welcome back,” Sister Mary Frances said to me that first morning. “Welcome back.” I had not yet been taught what to say in such situations, and so I said nothing. In the curious alphabet of our lives, Regina Bristol was one seat down from the front of the class, still in one of the middle aisles. Sometimes, in those days of being back, I would lose myself and watch the orange leaves and the red leaves and the gold leaves snowing down along Pierce Street. By then, by late October, my wound was healing as best it could, and our class was down to nine boys.

At about the same time Sergeant Percival Channing was finishing his business with the prostitute in the Half Moon Hotel on General Douglas MacArthur Boulevard in Okinawa, his daughter—thousands and thousands of miles away in Northeast Washington, D.C.—managed to find rest at the very end of the second night of no more sleep than a minute here and a minute there. The girl was in the last stages of a fever brought on by a sore throat, and while the pediatrician had said there was nothing to worry about, “just another passage through childhood,” the girl’s mother, who had become pregnant with her daughter three months before she was to enter nursing school, knew children throughout the world had died before they could negotiate such passages. So her fear did not abate when her child closed her eyes and found peace, and the mother continued sitting near the edge of her seat in a plain wooden chair built to last 142 years before that night by a man who had been a slave. The chair, now with year-old cushions from Hecht’s, had been given to her and Sergeant Channing as a wedding present. Seeing her child go away into sleep, however, the mother did allow her mind to drift somewhat, and she tried to remember just what time it was in Okinawa, whether the difference between the two cities was ten or eleven or twelve hours.

What the sergeant her husband did with the prostitute, he had not done with the mother of his child in nearly six months, and he would not do it ever again. Neither the sergeant nor his wife knew this as their only child turned in exhaustion onto her right side and entered a dream where Methuselah was waiting, not centuries old, not even a man, but waiting as a little girl who merely wanted to play.

The prostitute—Sara Lee, though she had been born and was still known to those who mattered as Keiko Hamasaki—called Sergeant Channing “passion capitain” as he lifted himself up with a grunt and left her body, and both of them, drunk and drugged, slept side by side for a very long time as the moon and the sun came and went. When Sara Lee finally lifted herself up on her elbows and shook her head, feeling the desire for a cigarette and for food, she did not know the time, for the year-old clock provided by the management of the Half Moon Hotel had worked only for the first month of its life and Sara had never owned a watch. The American military people in Okinawa had nicknamed her “My Time Is Your Time” because that was often what she said to them within minutes after meeting them. Sergeant Channing, still dead to the world beside her, had forgotten his own watch, and it had wound down back in his room on the base.

Sara Lee reached over the sergeant to get to his pack of cigarettes and three-dollar lighter on the small bedside table, and in reaching she had to support herself with one hand on the sleeping man’s chest. Sara Lee weighed next to nothing. Still, the sergeant’s eyes shot open and he screamed in such agony there in the third-floor back room that the Half Moon Hotel clerk down at the front desk could hear him, but the clerk did not let on and he continued talking to the corporal and his “Betty Crocker” as the latter two begged for a cheaper room.

“What the fuck you doin to me?” Percival Channing shouted to Sara Lee.

“No thing, passion capitain. No thing. Just a little bit cigarette. Just a little bit.” She knew perfect English, but she had learned with her first two Americans that they did not want perfection in the women they whored with.

Percival sat up and felt as if he were about to vomit. He covered his chest with one hand, not yet feeling the lump, and with the other hand he grabbed again and again at the air as though something out there might give him relief, if only by a few degrees. He leaned forward, still grabbing, and in the end he struggled out of bed and limped to the open window, where he bent down and gulped in the pitiful Okinawa air. “Jesus Christ! Jesus, what the fuck!”

Sara went to him and rubbed his back, repeating the profanity Percival had just spoken. He raised himself up from the window, feeling slightly better the closer he got to standing fully upright. He was crying, because it had been just that much pain. He turned to Sara and she held his shoulder. “What the fuck did you do to me, Betty? You stab me or what?”

“No stab, passion capitain. Just a little bit cigarette.” She had thought heart attack almost immediately, but the Americans were know-it-alls, and she felt it best that Sergeant Channing should come to his own diagnosis. Sara continued touching his shoulder as his breathing achieved some regularity. After he had rubbed the tears from his eyes, he put his right hand to his chest, now only half expecting a wound and flowing blood, and there, just below the right nipple, right where his heart would have been if a man’s heart were on that side, he felt the lump. He thought it her doing, a little Asian voodoo, but when he looked into her eyes and saw something far from a woman capable of harm, a great part of him thought some shit had descended upon him from being in the man’s army, from being in a foreign land among people who named themselves after food products. And a very, very tiny part of him thought that his body, long a thing of wonder chiseled after hundreds and hundreds of races on American high school and college tracks, had come to fail him somehow.