Edward Jones - All Aunt Hagar's Children

They laughed. It went on for a good minute. They had been together for many years, so that now one woman sounded like the other. Blondelle called to Harriet behind the bar. “Heard the latest? Soldier man’s now a detective man. Like in the picture show.” Harriet held a glass up to the light to see how clean she had gotten it. “Next he’ll be a rocket-ship man, heh?” There were four women drinking milk shakes at the bar.

“The problem you have is everybody in the world hated Ike,” Mary said. “Except his mother and his wife. They had to like him, had to love him.” When I was a sophomore at Dunbar, and Mary was a senior, my brother told me I had nothing to lose by asking her out. “But after them two,” she said, “what you should do is close your eyes and put your finger on a list of names. Whichever one you pick, thas who did it.” I followed Mary from school one day in April. She was walking with Blondelle, who wouldn’t peel off so I could be alone with Mary and ask her out. In the end, I just went up to Mary and asked to speak to her private-like. When I was done, she went over to Blondelle and said, “Would you mind if he and I went out?” “I would indeed,” said Blondelle, who didn’t seem mad, didn’t sound upset. My brother kept a lot about the world from me. “If I had told you,” he said to me later, “it wouldn’t be the same as finding out yourself.”

“Miss Agatha’s in pain,” I said.

“We love Miss Aggie,” Blondelle said. “So we wish we could help, but we have nothin.” She wore glasses, and it struck me for the first time ever that she was pretty. How had I missed that? The April day that Mary told me no, she took my hand and held it long enough for me to know that there should be no hard feelings. Blondelle walked away. Mary kissed my mouth. There was a pleasant smell I came to associate with all colored women. If a man is to be rejected by a woman, he should be rejected by a woman like Mary, for then he might not be bitter about women. Blondelle was saying, “You know what a devil Ike could be. You could accuse anybody in Washington.” She sighed. “You have a high mountain to climb. And even if you do find the person, you gotta go back down that mountain and tell it to Miss Aggie.” She drank. “You been to where they killed him?”

“What?”

“Where he was killed? He lived downstairs from Miss Aggie. The second-floor place.”

“I ain’t been there.”

“They didn’t teach you that in detective school?” Mary said. Blondelle killed the Coke. “They never taught you to visit the scene of the crime? You should use some a that mother wit you was born with.”

Blondelle said to Mary, “Oh, you know the private-dick people don’t like using mother wit. That would be too much like right.”

I blinked and then blinked again. The white woman, lying across the streetcar tracks in the middle of New Jersey Avenue, was the first woman I had ever seen die. I never saw one woman die in Korea. Not one. Zetcha kender lock gadank za tira vos ear lair rent doe .

It was near on seven o’clock when I got to Mr. and Mrs. Fleming’s house on 6th Street, where I was renting a room. It was late September, and though there was some sun left, I didn’t want to visit a dead man’s place with night coming on. In Korea I had got used to dead men everywhere, but that was different from one dead man on a street where I had grown up. I had played with that dead man when he wasn’t either of those things. I had been a happy boy on M Street.

I took a nap, and as soon as I stepped through the dream door the dead white woman was waiting for me. She was alive again. She had a child on either side of her, and I kept thinking that those children would help me to save her, help me to keep her always alive.

I called Freddy on the Flemings’ telephone when I woke, but he hadn’t returned.

On Sunday, I cleaned my room and went to Ike’s apartment, at 423 M Street. First I visited Miss Agatha on the third floor. She was glad to see me and I was glad for that. When I told her what I wanted to do, she gave me the key to her son’s place below her. She herself hadn’t seen the apartment since the night she and Alona, his wife, five months pregnant then, had found Ike. The landlord had had trouble renting the place even after it was cleaned up, Miss Agatha said, and no one had lived there since; colored people believed dead people should stay dead, but they also knew that dead people tended to follow their own minds. Clinging to Miss Agatha’s dress was her granddaughter, not quite two years old. “Hi,” the kid kept saying to me. “Hi hi.” I nodded to her and went downstairs.

I turned the key every which way, but the door refused to give, and I finally had to push my way in with such force that the place shook. I flicked on the light, though the sun coming through the bare windows should have been all a man needed. I looked at my watch and sighed. There was furniture, but I figured it was show furniture the landlord had put there to entice a possible tenant.

A cheap snapshot of Ike and Alona was taped to the icebox. In the picture, sepia, torn at one corner, Alona was smiling, but Ike, wherever they were, looked somber. Alona had a determined look. Perhaps she had been trying to get Ike to smile.

For some reason, there was only one chair at the table. At first, I thought this chair facing the window was the one Ike had been sitting in when the guy shot him in the back of the head. But with all the blood and stuff there must have been, this couldn’t be the death chair.

In the bedroom there was a stripped-down double bed. At the head of the bed, on the left side, where a pillow would have been, I saw the faint brown ghost of blood. I knew that Ike wouldn’t have moved from that kitchen table once he was hit, so it was blood from another event. In the bathroom there was a rather large bottle of Mercurochrome and three bottles of iodine in the medicine cabinet and, under the sink, a pasteboard box with bandages. There was also half a box of Kotex. I sighed again. I shook the pasteboard box and clumps of hair appeared from under the bandages. What could the landlord have been thinking, leaving all that shit there?

I returned to the kitchen. Whoever had cleaned it had done a good job. The apartment could have been rented if someone saw that room and didn’t know its history. I stood in the middle of the kitchen and turned around and around, looking at everything as critically as I could for long seconds. I had no goddam idea what the hell I was doing.

Miss Agatha gave me sweet potato pie when I went back up. Alona was also at the table, holding the child. “Hi hi,” the kid kept saying to me. The pie was good, but it wasn’t reward enough for having to put up with that child.

“They say you’re going to Alaska,” Alona said once I was midway through the pie. I nodded. She had been one of the smartest students Dunbar had ever known, destined for things that I, with my average brain, could never imagine. “Hi hi,” the child said. In her junior year Alona had fallen in, as my mother would have said, with Ike, and after that she was walking around on the plain old earth just like me and everybody else the Dunbar teachers never cooed over. Alona said, “I once read a Life magazine article about a man in Alaska who was seeking solitude. He made a place for himself that was eighty miles in any direction from other people. He lived there for twenty years.”

“That ain’t for me,” I said. “I need bodies around.” “Hi hi,” the girl said. I waved to her. I was nearing the end of the pie. I wanted another piece and wondered if it would be worth it to put up with her.

Alona grinned. “You might try something like that when you get there. If the gold doesn’t pan out, try it and write to me.” There was something positive in the way she was talking, as if she had been to Alaska, looked around, and knew things would go good for me there.