Edward Jones - All Aunt Hagar's Children

I felt as helpless as the day I first inspected Ike’s apartment. Sheila Larkin had her cup of coffee in her hand by now, was probably looking out her N Street window, thinking about me. I left off detective work and took the long way home.

Mojo’s was closed on Sunday. It was just as well. My mother always knew if I’d had even a drop of something before showing at her place for supper. Sometimes I gave a shit and sometimes I didn’t and would drink before going to her. “You been drinkin,” she had stated that last Sunday even before opening the door. That was all she talked about the rest of the evening. Then she dredged up ancient history: A month after I came back from Korea, I was still celebrating. One Tuesday I drank heavily at a friend’s place, in the Augusta apartments at New York and New Jersey Avenues, only two blocks up from where the white woman would die. I made a mistake and told my buddy I could walk home all right. I got out to the corner at about three in the morning and dropped down on the sidewalk. Actually, I dropped more in the street than on the sidewalk. In those days, most of D.C. was asleep at that time of the night, so there wasn’t any traffic to run over me. The street was warm, and all that warmth told me to take a nap. Man, just nap.

Where the old lady came from at that time of the morning I’ll never know. But after she roused me I could see through all the alcohol that she was dressed like she was going to church. At three in the morning on a weekday.

“Ain’t you Bertha’s baby boy? Ain’t you Penny’s nephew?” she asked after I managed to raise my head. Nap on, boy, just nap on. “You Bertha’s boy?” Even in the feeble streetlights, I could see, up and through that glorious haze, that I had never seen that woman before in my life. “Ain’t you Bertha’s boy? Got a brother name Freddy that married Dolley and Pritchard’s girl? You Bertha’s boy what went to Korea? Ain’t yall’s pastor Reverend Dr. Miller over at Shiloh Baptist?”

Hearing the lady talking, my buddy came down and they got me back up to his place. The old lady disappeared, and I never saw her again. My mother bided her time. One Sunday, three months later, after I said something “mannish” at supper, she brought up the drunk scene for the first time, told me what I was wearing down to the color of my socks, told me about the “ratty furniture” in every room of my friend’s apartment, told me how many empty bottles were on the kitchen table, about the half-naked woman on the couch. The drunken dog staggering from room to room. “Your life won’t be nothin but a long Tuesday night of devilment—Tuesday night and all day Wednesday…Kissin Miss Hattie’s hand with them drunken lips.” She went on for some thirty minutes, her voice never rising above a conversational tone. When she was finished, she pointed at my brother and then at the potatoes, which meant he was to pass them over to me. It was an orange-Kool-Aid Sunday. Joanne never said a mumbling word.

When I showed at my mother’s place on L Street at about four, Joanne and her big belly full of twins were there, my brother having dropped her off and gone to pick up something at the law library. We sat in the living room. I must say this: my mother never treated her living rooms like she was saving them for Jesus Christ to visit. No plastic slipcoverings and shit. “The key word in livin room is livin,” she used to say, so wherever we were the living room was as comfortable for Freddy and me as our own room.

“Mama, is there anything you can tell me bout this Ike thing? Somethin Miss Agatha didn’t tell me?” We were drinking grape Kool-Aid.

“I don’t think I can, son. He was troubled. I was there when he was born, and Ike came into the world full of trouble, God rest his soul.” Joanne was beside her on the couch, looking real satisfied with herself. “Son, you know all I know. You know he was into that…that mess.” She pointed at the crook in her arm and made a needle with her finger. “I lived fifty years before I knew a colored person doin that. And it was somebody like a son to me.” I perked up. My mother said, “What is the world coming to, Joanne? But he always yes-ma’amed and no-ma’amed me, I will give him that. And he wasn’t no parrot, either, so he meant it when he said it. He was brought up right. His mama and daddy saw to that. But boys have a way of turnin into men, and then they sell their mother wit for thirty pieces of silver.”

“Mama, you never told me Ike was doin that. Miss Agatha never told me, either.”

“Son, how easy you think it is to tell anybody that your child has fallen far from the height you worked to put him on? How many people would I want to blab to bout your drinkin and foolishness? Not that people don’t know already.”

“But I’m tryin to find out who did that to her son and she didn’t give me all the facts.”

“Well, you got all the facts.”

I went for more Kool-Aid and drank it at the kitchen window. She had raised my brother and me in Northwest, mainly around M Street, where Miss Agatha lived. Her new apartment was half a block past North Capitol Street, her first venture into Northeast. Slowly, place by place, my mother was trying to put herself midway between where I lived, on 6th Street, and where my brother and Joanne lived, in Anacostia. My brother saw Anacostia one day when he was nine—the hills, the Anacostia River, the indescribable pleasantness, the way the wind came up over the river as if straight from the cooling mouth of God—and he vowed then that he would live there when he became a man. I, too, saw the place that day, but all I remembered was the chickens running around. And the little white pig lounging under the shade tree.

I filled my glass again. Women. The evening of the day the white man attacked Miss Agatha, it was my mother who suggested that she, nearing eight, and my aunt, well past nine, and Miss Agatha, fourteen, go far away before the law came to get them. My grandfather and my grandmother, still in the doorway, thought it was the worst thing they had ever heard. But as the evening darkness came in and they lit the lamps and the candles and as the white man lay in the woods, they all knew the law would descend upon them. The law might even raise their dead and make them pay as well.

Along about midnight, after everyone had embraced them, the girls set out in two wagons, with my grandfather and his brother and Miss Agatha’s father and his brothers. The men were armed. By late morning, the girls were near the Georgia border. By the morning of the next day, driven by other male relatives and friends, they were well through Georgia. It took a week for them to get into North Carolina, carried by new wagons and horses driven by other relatives and friends. The girls’ belongings, what few there were, were always in the first wagon, and the girls, huddled together, were always in the second. All along the way, Miss Agatha cried to her companions that she was sorry for doing this to them. “Forgive me,” she said. “It ain’t nothin but a little bitty old thing,” my mother kept saying. Within two weeks, after wearing out four pairs of wagons and three teams of horses, they were in Washington, at the home of my grandfather’s cousin. He and his family were waiting. A week before, he had received a telegram: “Package arriving.”

When I returned to the living room, my mother was saying, “Now, he”—and she pointed at me—“wasn’t too much trouble comin out, but, oh, your husband was too much, Joanne. Two days. Two long days. I’m bound for Heaven cause I’ve had my hell right here in Washington, D.C. But I will say”—and she pointed to me again—“that he made up for that easy birth by havin his share a colic. And, when he slept, he slept kinda like this,” and my mother leaned her head to the side with one eye open and one eye shut.