Edward Jones - All Aunt Hagar's Children

I went out onto the fire escape and climbed up to Miss Agatha’s place. Even after all the snow and sun and rain and time, there were faint bits of brown midway up the window frame, as if someone with bloody hands, just last night, had held on to it to steady himself before entering the apartment. Blood spilled with violence never goes away, I remembered my mother teaching Freddy and me, and you can see it if you have a mind to. I raised the window. Immediately, Alona’s kid came up to the window. “Hi hi,” she said, raising her hand to me. I looked at the other side of the frame and saw more bits of brown, and there, at the frame, it all stopped. “Hi hi.” I adjusted my eyes and looked into the kitchen and saw Alona watching me. Her arms were folded across her breasts, her legs slightly apart. I looked at both sides of the frame again. Seeing Alona standing there, impervious for all eternity, I was suddenly chilled in every part of my body. “Hi hi,” the kid said. “Hi hi.” Mountains did not stand the way Alona stood. Dear God, I thought, dear God. Of all Ike’s crimes against her, what had been the final one? I became aware that in only a few steps Alona could be at the window and one powerful push could send me toppling over the fire escape. I became afraid. “Hi hi.” The kid kept holding her hand up to me, so I took her hand and I let her help me into the room. The child was named for Miss Agatha. “Hi hi,” she said. “Hi,” I said.

The white man who tried to drag Miss Agatha off into the woods when she was a child was never the same again, not in mind, not in body. He awoke in the woods three days later, caked with blood from head to toe, and picked himself up from what all the Negroes had believed was his deathbed. He spent his life saying he had been attacked by “somethin from God, somethin big, big like this.” God called him into preaching, but each sentence he spoke for the rest of his life had no relation to the one before it or to the one after it. He found a home at a very tiny church with a blue door, with people who believed his speech made no sense because that was how God wanted it. Never to be translated into understandable human talk. The law stayed satisfied that it was a drifter from beyond Choctaw who had attacked him. A stranger from faraway over yonder. The law let it be, and the world the white people had made for themselves was set right again.

It came to me over the next few days that I would never find gold in Alaska, not even if my life depended on it. My mother was at first silent when I told her about the blood I’d found, when I told her who had killed Ike. She set a Tuesday-night plate of food before me as I sat at her kitchen table and bade me eat. Then she sat across from me with her cup, two-thirds milk and one-third coffee. She held the cup with both hands and sipped and fought back the tears. I rose to go to her, but she held me back. “You decide what you must tell Aggie and then leave her in peace after that,” my mother commanded. “She knows what she knows. Maybe she needed someone like you in the world to know it, too. Tell her you know, if you got a mind to, and then leave us be. The only harm we ever done you was for your own good, and you must not forget that.”

I found a note on my desk from Dvera, Sam’s wife, when I returned two days later to the office I shared with him. The note, written in beautiful script, had a translation of Miriam Sobel’s last words: Once upon a time there was a rabbi and his wife…. Listen, children, remember, precious ones, what you’re learning here…. Funny, I said to myself. I would never have thought the words meant that just from what I heard. A moll, a rabbit, and his sin…

I went upstairs, where I had never been, to Dvera’s back office. The door was open. From the hallway, it seemed a very small room. But, once I was inside, it felt very large indeed, with everything a woman might need to be comfortable when she’s by herself. The doilies on the couch reminded me of my mother’s living room. Just inside the door was a samovar with a brilliant shine. Dvera was on the telephone, and, as it happened, it was Sam, still in Israel. I stepped all the way into the room. Above the light switch was a calendar with the time of the sunset noted at every Friday. She waved me over and handed me the telephone. Sam said he would be sad to see me go. I did not tell him that I would see Alaska only in some third life. After I’d said a few words to him, the line began to crackle and I felt it best to tell him good-bye. I gave the telephone back to Dvera. She began closing the conversation and pointed at a photograph sticking out of a large brown envelope on her desk. Then she giggled at something Sam said and blushed. “Don’t say that over the telephone,” she said.

The photograph was of Miriam Sobel, younger than the dead woman by nine and two-thirds years, give or take a day or two. Two identical boys with forelocks had hold of her hands. I took the picture to the window, where the light was better. What part would the rabbi’s wife play in the story? And, in the end, was the story really about her and not at all about the rabbi? I raised my eyes from the photograph of Miriam and saw a group of six little colored girls going down 8th Street toward E, all of them in bright colors. My eyes settled on a girl in a yellow dress. She was in the middle of the group and she alone twirled as they walked, her arms out, her head held back, so that the sun was full upon her face. Her long plaits swung with her in an almost miraculous way. It was good to watch her, because I had never seen anything like that in Washington in my whole life. I followed her until she disappeared. It would have been nice to know what was on her mind.

For more than forty-seven years, there had been miracle after miracle, each one reaching down and snatching her back from death while forsaking all the souls—loved and unloved by her, known and unknown to her—who happened to be in her little sphere of life at that moment. Leaving one of the University of Maryland’s libraries once, after failing to find an obscure book on the cohesion of solids, she had wandered over to the reference desk, curious at the last minute about a possible book on the meaning of names. The volume the librarian gave her was thin, lacking, and the best it could do for “Arlene” was to first offer a way to pronounce it, a way she wouldn’t have understood if she didn’t already know how to speak her own name. The “A” was upside down, and the “r” and the second “e” were facing the wrong direction. Then the book said of her name: “uncert. orig. and meaning.” She had been young enough that day at twenty-eight—her hair the longest it would ever be in the ponytail, she leaned against a wall in a corner where the sun was uncomfortably generous in that part of the library—to have hoped for what the book bluntly gave the name “Milagro,” which it assumed its readers already knew how to pronounce: Miracle.

Just about everything before that day at the creek was like something from a dream, a dream of some eight years. It had been a happy life, those years before the creek—an industrious father who, with his long workday over, liked to take Arlene’s cheek between his lips and hum until she wiggled away from him; a mother under whose long dress she hid from creatures they pretended were at the door; a loving brother older by five years who preened for girls much too old for him. And a farm that took care of most of their needs, an apple when the heart craved an apple, some cured meat in the middle of the worst of winter evenings, a farm that looked out onto an horizon that made her mother sigh with thanks in spring and summer as she sat on the porch with her sweetened well water. Her grandfather, healthy then, was in her life as well, but he was off to the side, waiting for God to bring him front and center.