Edward Jones - All Aunt Hagar's Children

I got a chair for Miss Agatha. Once seated, she pulled out her hatpins and took off her hat, a modest thing with a veil pulled back over it, black like her dress and black like her old-lady shoes with Cuban heels. A woman’s boy child deserved more than one year of mourning.

“I have waited and I done called the police,” Miss Agatha said. “I just wanna know who hurt my boy so I can put my mind to rest. I’ll leave the punishin up to God. But I must know. I even talked to a colored policeman at Number 2. You’d think a colored policeman would help me.”

“Trust what they do, Aggie, not the color of their skin, is what I say,” Aunt Penny said. “You put a Negro workin round white folks and he starts forgettin.”

“Miss Agatha, I’m no detective,” I said, looking first at her and then at my mother. I had been in the military police in Korea, doing nothing. Lording it over some Southern cracker for a bit. Helping drunks back to their tents and thinking myself blessed if I didn’t get puked on. But murder was a dance on the more complicated side of life. And I, a veteran hearing Alaska singing, didn’t want to ask any big questions and didn’t want anybody asking me any big questions. I was twenty-four and just starting to dance away on the easy side—a little soft-shoe here, a little soft-shoe there.

“You know a lot more than them fools at Number 2,” Aunt Penny said. Working in Sam Jaffe’s office, I wanted to say, wasn’t the same as finding a killer. Sam, a lawyer, did some private detective work, and I sometimes went along with him when I wasn’t filing. But mostly I just filed. A veteran doing ABCs.

“You the only thing close to the law we got,” my mother said. “Talk to Aggie. Listen to what she got to say. You know her. She was there when I birthed you.”

“Whatever you can do would be good,” Miss Agatha said. “It all just worries the heart so much. It worries the mind. I can’t sleep at night. A few crumbs of why would be better than what I’m gnawin on now.” She took off one glove and put her hand over mine. Flesh must meet flesh, my mother had taught her sons. Never shake hands with your glove on. Miss Agatha’s husband had died of a stroke four years ago. She was wearing her wedding ring, and it was shiny and unmarred.

“He’ll help us, Aggie. Don’t worry bout that,” Aunt Penny said, putting both hands on Miss Agatha’s shoulders. “They gonna pay, whoever did it.” Since Sam had left for Israel on business, I’d been leaning back in my chair facing that giant window onto F Street and imagining returning to Washington with Alaska gold. I saw myself walking down M Street, strutting about New York Avenue, my pockets bulging with nuggets, big pockets, big as some boy’s pockets fat with candy—your Mary Janes, your Squirrel Nuts, your fireballs.

It was my mother who came up with the idea of the three of them leaving Alabama. It was late evening of the day she and my aunt had beaten the white man. He still lay in the woods, alone except for what animals came, sniffed, and walked over him. All the Negroes who had any business knowing knew what had happened, but not a white soul knew. At first, the Negroes understood, the law would be thinking the culprit was a stranger from someplace else; it was a nice world the law and its people thought they had in Choctaw, Alabama, and coloreds in that place didn’t do bad things to white people, whom the law was built to protect.

The families of the three girls were sitting and standing around the parlor in Miss Agatha’s house. She was in her father’s arms on the settee. The youngest children were being fed in the kitchen. My grandfather, arms crossed and leaning in the doorway, said that the men in that room should go out and kill the white man if he wasn’t dead already. “Finish him for good,” he said. “I’ll kill him with my own hands and be done with it.”

No one said anything for some time. One boogeyman erased forever from a child’s life was tempting, and in the quiet their hearts reached for it. But everyone in that room feared God and wanted one day to sit in the aura of his majesty. And they wanted to be able to sit there in the happy company of my grandfather. That could not happen if he came before God with murder on his hands.

“Morris, we won’t have no talk of that,” my grandfather’s mother said eventually. She was sitting at the back of the room in a cane-bottomed chair, leaning over because she breathed best that way. She was not fifty years out of slavery. She was five years from death. She had seen death following her for more than three years. “Do it or leave me be.”

“Then what kinda talk is we gonna have, Mama?”

“Not none of my son goin out and killin somebody in cold blood.” My grandfather’s mother raised her head and looked at her son. Her walking stick, with a series of snakes carved into it, was across her lap. Someone had sent for the preacher, but he hadn’t arrived. He was a drinking man and Sunday was the only day he could be counted on. Miss Agatha had been attacked on a Wednesday.

My grandfather smiled. “In hot blood, then, Mama. I’ll kill him in hot blood.”

“Do nothin, Morris,” my grandfather’s mother said. “You can’t kill in Aggie’s name. What would become of her? Ask yoself that, son. What would become of Aggie? What would become of your own chirren if you had your way with him? What would come of Penny and Bertha if you killed that man?”

A moll is gav vain ah rev und ah rab-bit sin,” I said as I listened to the three women go back down the stairs. I watched them walk the few steps to 8th Street and turn the corner, heading to Kann’s Department Store. It was the Sabbath, so Sam’s wife, Dvera, was not upstairs in the back office. She and I rarely spoke, and I had never been up to the third floor. She made me nervous, moving about in her silence with those fat ankles.

I called my brother, whom Sam had encouraged to become a lawyer. He might know where I should start to look for a murderer. His wife, Joanne, told me he was out. Joanne was pregnant. A root worker had had Joanne throw ten hairpins up in the air and have them fall on one of Joanne’s head scarves. Examining the pattern of the fallen pins, the root worker predicted that Joanne would be having twin girls. The news excited my mother like nothing else I’d seen. I didn’t care. I was not a man to suffer the company of children. Joanne said, “I’ll have Freddy get in touch.” “No,” I said. “I guess it can wait.” Lying naked in her bed beside me, Sheila Larkin had said two months ago, “I’ll wait for you until you return from Alaska, man. I’ll wait.”

At about four, I closed the office and drove to Mojo’s in my Ford, the only meaningful thing I had bought with my army money, taking the route I thought would best help me to avoid Sheila Larkin. I had been very successful in avoiding Sheila since I’d broken up with her. I knew how vicious she could be. I did not want to go to Alaska with a face scarred by lye. At Mojo’s, on North Capitol just up from New York Avenue, Mojo’s wife, Harriet, told me he was away. I had a few sips of beer at the bar, and when Mary Saunders and Blondelle Steadman came in, I followed them to a booth. They had been in my brother’s class at Dunbar High School. I once thought I loved Mary.

“What you out and about for on a nice Saturday, soldier man?” Mary said. She had come from Jamaica when she was about twelve and Jamaica was still there when she talked. “Hear Alaska was calling you. You done had all our women and now you want theirs.” They were sharing a cherry Coke.

“Still going, but I have to do a few things fore I leave. Yall member Ike?” Blondelle nodded, and Mary drank some Coke. “Miss Agatha want me to find out who did it.”