Edward Jones - All Aunt Hagar's Children

She was still in bed when Miss Waterford arrived late the next morning, Sunday. It was the morning after the night Miss Waterford had decided that marriage was not what she needed at that time in her life. The books were all closed when she opened the door to Arlene’s bedroom. The grandfather was in a bright corner of the room in a chair with a cup of cold coffee in both his hands. He had been there all night, and he, like the teacher, had already decided about his life.

“I can’t write a composition, Miss Waterford,” Arlene said as the teacher took off her hat and stuck the hatpin down through the top of it. The man Miss Waterford would have married had a heart not of this world, and he had lent her his car to come to Arlene even though she had told him she would not marry him.

“I know,” Miss Waterford said, “I know.” She acknowledged the grandfather and then sat on the side of the child’s bed. “Perhaps I have long asked too much of my students.” She placed her hat at the foot of the bed. She took Arlene’s hand. The journey to Arlene should have taken her by the Dailey place, but Miss Waterford had chosen the long way around. “Perhaps the sun and the moon are too much to ask of my students. Perhaps the moon is enough.” It was something the headmistress, Dr. Hines, would have said. And Miss Waterford thought, I have become what I said I would not become.

A neighbor stayed with Arlene while the grandfather and Miss Waterford attended the funerals of the five Dailey children. The three surviving Dailey children had been away in town the day their siblings were killed, at the funeral of an aunt who died giving birth to triplets. The brand-new driver of the green Chevrolet had died as well, but his funeral was held on another day, just before dawn in a part of Tennessee he and his people had never seen.

As the grandfather had suggested, Miss Waterford took Arlene with her to Alamo. When they returned more than two weeks later, again in her former fiancé’s car, the grandfather was nowhere about, and no one could tell them what had happened to him. Miss Waterford stayed with Arlene for almost a week as the authorities made a show of trying to find the man, but the grandfather was never seen again. “She is an orphan again,” Miss Waterford, who would follow Arlene to the Nashville school, said to the headmistress on the telephone. “I’m an orphan again,” Arlene said, thinking of the children in the work of Charles Dickens as she and Miss Waterford packed her things. “But you know more than you did before,” her teacher said. “I don’t think so,” Arlene said.

The headmistress, Dr. Hines, had been taught home economics and not a great deal more as a girl and young woman at Mrs. Wilbur Ross’s Finishing School for the Colored Elite. Years before Dr. Hines decided to establish her own Nashville Beginning School for Negro Women, her first husband, a teacher of English, a writer of many novels about “the highest and brightest” class of Negroes, had left her, her finishing school education, and their two children. She was certainly the best wifely material the finishing school ever turned out. In the home of that marriage, the collars of all her husband’s shirts had been starched to cardboard stiffness, and there were homemade sachets tucked discreetly into the back corners of drawers. But one day, a child on either side of her, the woman who was to become the headmistress Dr. Hines opened the tastefully yellow door to that home and found that what her husband wanted was not in her repertoire. And with that inadequate repertoire after the writer-teacher left her, she, a child on either side of her, had had to go back out into the world and strengthen her credentials, becoming along the way an economist and a mathematician. “Numbers do not lie,” Dr. Hines told Arlene and her entering class their first day of orientation. “If they do, the fault lies with you.”

The Nashville school, with grades six through twelve, usually had about a hundred colored girls of all shades, mostly the daughters of a few enlightened, well-to-do Negroes from throughout the country who had looked at the world and discovered, as Dr. Hines had, that Negro girls, their daughters, should be fortified with as much education as possible. Those hundred students included fifteen or so poor girls, whose educations were paid for by scholarships primarily financed by the wealthier families. “Each One Help One” was the school’s motto. Indeed, the headmistress, still overseeing Arlene’s money, took from Arlene’s bank account money that helped pay for room and board for an Alabama sharecropper’s daughter.

The years there were over before Arlene knew it; in four years she absorbed what it took most girls six years. She had few friends, and Dr. Hines and the other teachers did not push her to go out and make any more than those three or four with whom she was comfortable. They were mostly satisfied that she had found comfort and success in the solidity and certainty of science, primarily biology and chemistry. If, Arlene had discovered happily, you did everything you were supposed to do—from the correct calculations to the right amount of flame under the Bunsen burner—it all came out right in the end. She found comfort in the caves of science where good and innocent people did not die for no other reason than that they were near her.

At twenty-two, she would write in her diary that “the world escaped fairly unscathed” from her time at Nashville and at Holy Cross. She could write that by not counting, for one thing, the fire at the tiny hotel in West Virginia that occurred in her last year at Dr. Hines’s establishment. She had feigned an illness so as not to have to go to West Virginia, but Miss Waterford knew her well by then and made her go anyway. Her class went for a long weekend to a small and beautiful town where John Brown and his men were said to have spent their last night before the Harper’s Ferry raid. One of the owners of the hotel, the husband, was nearly deaf and misheard on the telephone how many were in Arlene’s class, and so one student was required to stay in an alcovelike attachment connected to the main building by a short walkway. Arlene volunteered and spent two and a half nights in a pleasant room big enough for only one. Next to her room was a larger one with a Washington, D.C., family of five. In the diary entry, she would also feel safe in not counting the alcove fire because it was started by the youngest child of the D.C. family and because one human being survived. The fire child died, and so did her mother and two siblings. The father escaped because that night he had gone into the woods where John Brown and his people had slept to be with the other owner of the hotel, the wife. That wife did not believe her husband was almost deaf and went to the woods so he would not hear her making love among the animals and the wind-touched trees and a brook that gurgled loudly even though it was nearly dry. The fire child had awakened in the night, afraid, and once again had found her father, a smoker, gone.

And in the diary Arlene did not count the disastrous boat trip while at Holy Cross, primarily because there were two survivors, one being a young man from Wesleyan University. The boat trip was their second date. Those dates were the first of her life. She was a senior, and he, Scott Catrell, was a junior at Wesleyan. Up from Connecticut to visit friends, he had seen her walking in downtown Worcester. Had followed her that day the two miles or more all the way back up the hill to Holy Cross. After three months of telephone calls and letters she had said yes to a date in late January of her last year, for no other reason than that her mentor, the priest of failing faith, had died a week before. “Scott is awkward in his own body,” she wrote weeks after the boat trip to Miss Waterford, who had become the Reverend Mrs. Campbell, “as if he had been put together by a dozen Dr. Frankensteins. But that is not why I know I could never love him.” She had come to believe that death, with all her miracles, had merely overlooked her somehow, and that to make up for such a stupendous mistake on its part, death was planning something quite spectacular.