Edward Jones - All Aunt Hagar's Children

The headmistress and the grandfather at first considered that Arlene go with her back to the preparatory school, but he was well enough to know that that would crush him once and for all. Instead, the headmistress wrote to a teacher, one of her former students, who lived and taught in a nearby place called Alamo. The headmistress asked that she come out regularly and tutor Arlene “before she descends into savagery.” The teacher, Miss Waterford, had found several gems among her colored students in Alamo, and she was confident that she might find another in Arlene. She arrived with her fiancé in his car, a day after the headmistress returned to Nashville, and her spirits sank in those first minutes with Arlene: English so bad it sounded like a foreign language. And the child knew the sum of one and one only because she used her fingers. Miss Waterford returned to Alamo and immediately wrote to the headmistress, “Why have you asked still another burden of me, Dr. Hines? Am I always to be tethered?” Two and a half decades after that letter, Miss Waterford, then the Reverend Mrs. Campbell, would be rewarded, once again, when Arlene dedicated her second book, The Relationship of Solids to Ethereal Matter, to “Miss Waterford, Who Called Me Back from the Wilderness.” After she received the letter following Miss Waterford’s initial meeting with Arlene, the Nashville headmistress promptly wrote back to her former student, “Would I place this burden on your shoulders if I did not know that my blood, the blood of your teacher, flows through Arlene’s veins?”

Arlene’s grandfather sold the farms of his two sons and banked the money for Arlene’s future, with the headmistress being given fiduciary responsibility. He then sold off parts of his own farm and used the proceeds to better his and Arlene’s lives, including paying for Miss Waterford’s teaching and for neighbors to come in to clean and cook. He kept enough land to make a buffer, so that he would not have to see from his window or his porch other men, strangers or friends, toiling land that had tried to break him and his father and his father’s father.

The grandfather’s mind slowly returned to that of a man who had no more than an hour before lost so many loved ones to the creek. There were some days with Arlene when he would manage to raise his head above the pain to enjoy a meal with her or a wagon ride into town for her favorite ice cream. Horseshoes out in the backyard. But more and more of the time with him were silent hours they spent sitting side by side on the porch. The sun came up to the right. He would sometimes try to step through the silence and take her hand in his and offer some memory of one of the dead, but before he could finish, he would turn quiet and take his hand from hers and place it back in what passed for his lap. The sun went down to the left, and throughout the day it dangled out there before them, not offering much that was good, and not offering much that was the other way either. When she knew he was not coming back with the rest of any memory, she would take from the crowded porch table beside her one of the many books Miss Waterford had purchased for her. The moon was out there, too, but when it was at its brightest, at its strangest, the grandfather was usually asleep, and Arlene was reading in her bed.

Miss Waterford, afraid that a child with Arlene’s mind would pass too quickly into adulthood, had made playing with the neighbor children a part of Arlene’s everyday regime when she was not there. But Arlene, who began to live only to read, was forever neglecting to go down the hill to the right to the Mason children or up the hill to the left to the Daileys, and so when her teacher returned and questioned her about playing, she would lie, and not very well, “another sign,” Miss Waterford wrote Dr. Hines, the Nashville headmistress, that “she may be becoming old before her time.” And so despite all Miss Waterford’s efforts, she became a child who could “live peacefully unto myself.” That was what she wrote in her essay when she applied to the College of the Holy Cross at sixteen. An aging Jesuit—who had discovered too late in his life that while God walked with him, he did not enjoy walking with God—read the essay. He was a chemistry and biology professor at Holy Cross who had volunteered to read the essays of the college’s science applicants as one small way to ease his growing despair. He loved the phrase “live peacefully unto myself,” and he knew even before he had finished her essay that the school on the hill might not be such a bad place if it gave a home to a young woman who knew at least that one thing about herself.

But before Holy Cross, and before she went off to the headmistress’s preparatory school in Nashville, there were three more miracles. The first and second saw the deaths of four human beings and two cows and three chickens; that second miracle, which took the lives of two humans and two chickens, occurred on a weekend trip with Miss Waterford to Alamo. (“When the roll of the dead is called,” Arlene at eighteen wrote whimsically in her diary while at Holy Cross, “why should dead cows and dogs and chickens be excluded?”) After those two miracles, a sad, tiny lot of the Tennessee dispossessed began calling Arlene “the blessed one.” And some of them, from all around the state, traveled to the farm and knocked gently on the door and asked before it was opened if they might have a word with the good Miss Arlene: Parents with children crippled from birth with gnarled limbs. Men who had gambled away their pittances and vanished while their families were reduced to begging. Women going into madness because one of the first lessons they had learned in life was to bed down with any man who told them sweet but empty words. Arlene, who never came out to them, was never afraid, just curious as she watched from the parlor windows as neighbors shooed them away. (“Why did not anyone,” she wrote in her diary at thirty in Washington, D.C., “seek to burn me at the stake?”) In the end, after a week of people coming by, the headmistress and the teacher, backed by the grandfather in an especially lucid moment, had to hire three armed men—one Negro on a horse, one Negro on a twenty-five-year-old motorcycle, and one white man in his father’s noisy pickup truck—to keep people from coming onto the property. A few souls still came to stand across the road in the pasture a half a mile from the house. They sat and stood in all kinds of weather, and they, never more than ten at a time, were out there for nearly seven months, thinking only one thing—“If I have already been through a part of the doom, maybe this child can deliver me and mine.”

It was only after the third miracle before going to Nashville that she began to see herself as special, but it gave her no optimism about her place in the world. (“If,” she wrote in the diary her second week at Holy Cross, “you live your life and all about you they are dying, what kind of life can you ever have?”) After the dispossessed stopped coming and watching from across the road, Miss Waterford told Arlene to go out and play again with the neighbor children. The teacher, having seen through her earlier lies about playtime, began requiring Arlene to write compositions of at least five hundred words about playtime episodes. And so not five weeks before going to the Nashville Beginning School for Negro Women, not two months after turning twelve, Arlene was playing school with the Dailey children who lived midway up the hill to the left. It was her turn to be in the role of teacher as the brand-new green Chevrolet with its brand-new driver topped the hill at a selfish speed and came down the road going past the Dailey property. Her hands behind her back, Arlene had shifted the pebble from her right to her left hand and presented her closed fists to the youngest Dailey girl, seven-year-old Petunia, who was on the bottom step there at the edge of the Dailey home. Picking the hand with the pebble would have sent Petunia from the kindergarten to the first grade, the second step. Her siblings had all passed and were on various steps and Petunia alone was on the kindergarten step, mumbling that she was being left behind and that it was not fair. The child, her knees almost up to her chin, raised one end of the Band-Aid on her right knee, peeked at her new cut, blew it a kiss, and then tapped the end of the bandage back down. As that hand prepared to touch Arlene’s left hand, the car, which had swiftly left the road with its horn honking all the way, came speeding into the clean, flowered yard, into the children on the porch in their many grades. Arlene’s closed hands, palms down, were still outstretched, and when she looked up from them as the wind and violence of it all blew her plaits and her dress, she could see the empty space the car had made, could see through the fence a half a mile away, all the way over to the mountains. It was, to be sure, a new view, and her mind took longer than it should have, given her history, to tell her why.