Edward Jones - All Aunt Hagar's Children

At the corner of 10th and N, he stopped and considered the quarter again. Down 10th was Lincoln’s death house. Up 10th was the house where he had been a boy, and where the puppy was waiting for his father. A girl at the corner was messing with her bicycle, putting playing cards in the spokes, checking the tires. She watched Caesar as he flipped the quarter. He missed it and the coin fell to the ground, and he decided that that one would not count. The girl had once seen her aunt juggle six coins, first warming up with the flip of a single one and advancing to the juggling of three before finishing with six. It had been quite a show. The aunt had shown the six pieces to the girl—they had all been old and heavy one-dollar silver coins, huge monster things, which nobody made anymore. The girl thought she might now see a reprise of that event. Caesar flipped the quarter. The girl’s heart paused. The man’s heart paused. The coin reached its apex and then it fell.

On what was to have been one of my last days in Washington, my mother, my aunt, and murdered Ike’s mother came up to the second-floor office I had been sharing with Samuel Jaffe. This was three weeks after Sam had gone to Israel, and a little more than nine months since I’d left the Korean War. When the big front door downstairs opened and shut, it shook the windows of our building on F Street, and as the three women came in I watched the giant window in our office do a quick, awful shaking, then slowly come to rest. I heard the three coming up the stairs and learned seconds later that it was murdered Ike’s mother who was wearing those heavy black old-lady shoes, which made the loudest sound as the women clumped their way up to me. This was two months since I’d told Sheila Larkin as kindly as I could that she and I were finished. “So, you have your way with this woman and now you tellin her to just disappear?” The three women were all the while talking, talking as easily as if they were sitting around over coffee and sweet rolls in one of their living rooms, the way they had no doubt been doing since before I was even a consideration in my mother’s eye. Then they were standing in my doorway, the three of them. I turned from the giant window showing me a beautiful day on F Street and faced them. I put down the box I was holding and brushed myself off; a man like me does not greet the woman who brought him into the world while holding a box of dusty belongings from an undistinguished life. This was a little more than a month since the white woman had died right in front of my eyes. “ No, Sheila baby, that ain ’ t what I ’ m sayin at all.”

“Talked to Freddy, and he told me say hi,” my mother said. My older brother was studying to be a lawyer. She offered her cheeks and I kissed them, her face wrinkle-free. “I’m guiltless,” she once said to me. Her dark cheeks were lightly rouged. As a rule, my mother wasn’t demonstrative. She lived in a sphere all her own, where few things could intrude and hurt her anymore. She always let Freddy and me in, but she kept her eye on the door while we visited, lest we say something wrong and she had to show us out. I got a letter from Freddy three weeks after I hit Korea: “You’d best return alive or Mama will never be the same. She can’t stop crying.” I spent many Korean months trying to reconcile the mother to beat all mothers of my childhood with the mother in Freddy’s letters who was mourning me.

I touched my mother’s elbow and stepped around her to Aunt Penny. I kissed her cheek. She and Uncle Al owned a grocery store at 5th and O Streets, N.W. As children, Freddy and I had all the sweets boys could want. “Love ya,” Aunt Penny said. The three women were all wearing gloves on that warm day; theirs may have been the last generation of Negro women to go about the world in such a way. “Here, Aggie,” my aunt said, turning to Miss Agatha. I hugged Miss Agatha. I hadn’t seen her for months, though we had talked soon after I returned from Korea, when I made the obligatory visits in my uniform to family and friends: a Negro had gone off to the man’s war and survived to tell about it to all who had prayed for him. Miss Agatha’s only child had been murdered while I was in Korea, and Freddy had sent me the articles from the Daily News. Ike Appleton had always gone for bad. He beat me bloody when I was in junior high school, and Freddy found him and whipped him just as bad, and after that I never had any trouble from Ike. The articles had a picture of Ike in his high-school-graduation cap.

Miss Agatha’s face had enough lines for all three women—someone had come up behind Ike as he sat over supper and blown his brains out.

“You look well,” Miss Agatha said. “Maybe workin downtown mongst white folks grees with you.” When I was eight, I went to some boy’s birthday party and spent days telling Freddy about the good time I’d had and about all the boss gifts the boy had received. On the third day of all that talking, my mother, unsmiling, said to me, “Remember, every happy birthday boy is headed for his grave.”

I asked Miss Agatha, “How you been?”

“Fine. In my way.”

My mother came around me. I knew she had been behind me, taking the measure of me and the room, finding something she could use against me. She took off her gloves, slowly, one long finger after another. “She’s here to ask for your help,” my mother said. “Aggie thinks you know things. It ain’t for me to tell her different.” I looked at her. “She thinks her way.” Any day now, I was due to go off to Alaska to hunt for gold with a war buddy. (“I didn’t think white people let Negroes into white Alaska,” my mother said when I mentioned my plans.) The “favor” thing sounded like a big obstacle between me and gold and cars and clothes and more women than I could shake a dick at, as my buddy had put it. I was ready for a new place; I was a veteran of Washington, D.C., and there was nothing else for me to discover here. And I wanted to get far away, because I thought it might help me to stop thinking about that dead white woman. “A moll is gav vain ah rav und ah rabbit sin,” the woman had said as she was dying. The night before, I dreamed I had been able to save her. She had gotten up off the streetcar tracks and walked away. “A favor. We don’t ask for much,” my mother was saying.

That could be true about women. Even Sheila Larkin had said it that last time, when I told her we were finished: “God knows I don’t ask for much from you, man.” Maybe in Alaska I could learn something new about women and become a different kind of veteran. My mother opened her pocketbook and dropped her gloves into it and, while looking at me, one of her two living children, snapped it shut. That sound was all the room had.

“They killed my Ike,” Miss Agatha said, as if I needed to be reminded. He was one of only sixty-six people murdered in D.C. that first year I was away. “Near bout two years gone by, and they ain’t done any more than the day it happened.”

“If they are doin somethin, they keepin it secret,” Aunt Penny said. “One more colored boy outa their hair. It’s a shame before God, the way they do all Aunt Hagar’s children.”

“Penny,” my mother said, “don’t get worked up now.” My mother was the youngest of them, Miss Agatha the oldest by at least five years. When the three were girls in Alabama, a white man had set out after Miss Agatha as they walked home from school. The man tried to drag her into the woods and have his way with her. My mother and my aunt picked up rocks and beat the man down to the ground until he was no more than an unconscious lump. In the woods, when it was done, the girls held each other and cried, half out of their minds, afraid of what the world was going to do to them. They were barefoot. The man lay in the woods for three days, covered with tree bark and leaves, half in life, half in death. He was not a rich man, but he was white. So when the law discovered him, dead or alive, it would do everything to find out what had happened to him.