Edward Jones - All Aunt Hagar's Children

Iwoke up Monday morning with the dead white woman speaking in my head. A moll and a rabbit …As I looked at my face in the mirror while I shaved, it came to me that I might not ever be able to get the voice out of my head. When my great-grandfather was a slave, a patroller who owned no slaves and little more than what he was wearing killed a slave who was coming back from seeing his wife on another plantation. The dead man had been my ancestor’s best friend. My great-grandfather called himself by the dead man’s name forever after that, and no one, not even his wife and seven children, could move him from it. I have that dead man’s name. Way down in Choctaw, Alabama, there are two names on my great-grandfather’s tombstone. Two dates of birth and two dates of death.

I didn’t do much about finding Ike’s murderer until the next Sunday. I spent some of that week getting stuff together at Sam’s office. The rest of the time I just hung out at Mojo’s. I didn’t take Miss Agatha’s advice about resting on the Lord’s day and went out that Sunday morning after breakfast to do what I could. My Ford was acting up again, so I left it in front of the house. I went up 6th Street. There was a big crowd around Daddy Grace’s church, but I didn’t see anyone I knew. I turned onto M. Sheila Larkin slept very late on Sunday, so I wasn’t afraid of meeting her.

I knocked at the front first-floor apartment in Miss Agatha’s building. A woman opened the door, and as soon as she did a mynah bird in a giant cage behind her gave a wolf whistle, quite distinct and quite loud. It was about twelve o’clock; Sheila was stretching in her bed, wondering if today was the day she would get me. After I told the woman who I was and what I wanted, she opened the door wider to let me in. She was wearing a housecoat. She could have been thirty or forty. I was getting better at determining a woman’s age, but I wasn’t yet good enough to tell about her. She was good-looking, and she would be that way for a long while.

“Oh, yes! Oh, yes! Just like that!” the bird said.

The woman pointed to an easy chair for me to sit in, and sat across from me on a couch with cushions that had deep impressions. Somebody had sat on those things and the cushions had never got over it. She said her name was Minnie Parsons.

“I ain’t sure what I can tell you,” Miss Minnie said, crossing her legs. “I talked to some colored cop a day or so after it happened. He asked me questions, but he seemed more interested in Billie, there. ‘How you make it talk?’ he kept sayin. ‘How you get him to say all that?’ He didn’t seem to care much about poor Ike.”

“I’m only flesh and blood!” Billie said.

She said she knew Ike “only in passin,” and as she crossed and recrossed her legs, something told me that it wasn’t true. “I knew Alona better. And Miss Agatha’s like my own mother.” Her apartment was well kept, pictures of children on the walls, pictures of adults in Sunday clothes on the mantelpiece. On the wall behind the couch there was just a cross, with Jesus’ head hanging down, because he had given up the ghost. The obligatory cloth covered his privates. The nails through his hands and feet were painted red. No blood. “You at Number 2?” Miss Minnie said.

“No, ma’am.” I told her I wasn’t a detective and had just been in the military police in Korea.

“Don’t treat me like I’m that old,” she said. “Don’t go yes-ma’aming me. I ain’t old. You want somethin to drink?” I said no. “My husband was in the army,” she said after a bit. “He was a cook. Still a good cook. Can’t you tell?” She leaned to the side and slapped her thigh.

“Like that?” the bird asked.

I asked her if she had been home the night Ike was killed. She said that she had but that she heard nothing. She knew Miss Agatha had been out, maybe at church. She didn’t know where Alona was. “Ain’t no book that girl ain’t read…. I heard Miss Agatha come in and go upstairs. It wasn’t long before I heard both of them screamin. The whole buildin shook with them screamin.”

“That a girl bird or a boy bird?” I asked.

She considered Billie for a while as it hopped down to the floor of the cage, stuck its head through the bars of the cage door, and looked to the left. “I ’m only flesh and blood! I’m only flesh and blood!”

“I don’t really know,” Miss Minnie said. “Could be either. A woman once told me she could come and turn Billie upside down and inspect Billie’s natural parts and then say one way or another, but I never sent for her. I suspect Billie’s a girl.”

“Oh.”

“A woman knows when another woman’s in her nest.”

“There’s more to come, somebitch!” Billie said.

Miss Minnie didn’t react at all to the bad word, and I remembered my mother once saying that a woman comfortable around curse words would be comfortable around the Devil. I was ready to go. Miss Minnie said, as I stood up, “I will say that in my dealins with Ike he treated me with the utmost respect. Now, my husband…Hal didn’t care for Ike too much. Billie liked him, though, cause she doesn’t discriminate.” She crossed her legs the other way again. “Would you like somethin to eat? Wouldn’t be no trouble to heat up a little somethin.”

“No, ma’am.”

“Oh, yes! Oh, yes! Just like that!”

“What I done told you bout that ma’am stuff?”

“Your husband comin back soon?”

“Oh?” she said. “Whatcha mean by ‘soon’?” She laughed. “He just went to the store for somethin for breakfast. But he always stays long enough to be out to butcher the pig and collect the eggs. He’ll be gone a long time. He slow that way.”

I left, went down to the corner of M and 4th, and stood there so I could see into Leon’s store. The only man in it came out with a mediumsized paper bag and was walking on crutches. One of his legs had been cut off below the knee, while the other had been cut off above the knee. I watched him cross the street to my side and move past me so silently that if I hadn’t seen him with my own eyes, I wouldn’t have known he was there. No huffing and puffing, no rattling from the paper bag, no sound from the crutches hitting the sidewalk. Just a nothing spiriting on down the street. He looked mean and tough, but maybe that was just me trying to compensate for a fellow veteran who had lost so much. He said something to a little girl coming the other way and went into Miss Minnie’s building. I got to the building and asked the little girl, who was holding an even smaller girl by the hand, if she knew the man.

“Everybody know Mr. Hal,” the girl said.

I went through the files in my memory trying to recall if that was what Miss Minnie had called her husband. I couldn’t remember at all. Billie, I knew, was the bird’s name, because she had mentioned the thing many times. “Mr. Hal married to Miss Minnie, right?” I said to the girl.

The girls looked at each other and laughed. “Evbody know that,” the smaller girl said. “How come you don’t know that?”

“Forget him,” the older girl said, and before the girls went off she twirled her index finger around and around an inch from her ear. “Yeah,” she said. “Just forget him if he don’t know that. I bet he don’t even know Mr. Hal ain’t got no legs.” “Forget him anyway,” the smaller girl said.

I stood outside the building, trying to decide if I should give Hal a pass on murdering Ike based on the crutches. I didn’t have anybody else to suspect right then, so I kept him in my mental suspect files. Miss Agatha had let me keep the key to her son’s place, but I decided against going back up there, lest she hear me and I have to tell her I’d found out nothing yet.