Edward Jones - All Aunt Hagar's Children

After Holy Cross, there was Georgetown and then the University of Maryland as she worked for two doctorates. While earning the second degree, she secured a research position at the National Institutes of Health and was given a nice corner space to work in, alone. Not too much sun and not too much moon; and intercoms and telephones—and later computers—to connect her with two assistants down the hall and around the corner from her space. She could count her friends on her two hands, including those she had in Tennessee. And though she begged him not to, Scott Catrell followed her after Wesleyan to the area and entered Howard University’s medical school. They never lived together, but dated and saw each other sporadically for nearly two decades and a half. He married three times—always to women who first asked him to marry them—and he was divorced three times. No children. Over all those years, he was comforted only by the fact that there were no other men in Arlene’s life beyond those, living and dead, who had cleared paths and brought light to the mysteries of biology and chemistry.

When she was forty-three, and had not seen or talked to Scott for two years, they noticed each other at the 12th Street entrance to Hecht’s—she was coming out, empty-handed, and he was going in. It was a very cold day, cold enough to snap the bones of steel-driving men, a day when five homeless people would die in their sleep. “How am I doing at not ever contacting you?” Scott asked, smiling. Four months later, Arlene became pregnant with his child. “How,” she wrote the Reverend Mrs. Campbell, “could two intelligent people of science be so stupid as to become pregnant?” “People of science?” the Reverend Mrs. Campbell wrote back. “Despite all that has happened to you, you are, in the end, no better than all the rest of us, science or no science, who must fight to stay afloat. We want, we rage, we desire, we fail, we succeed. We stand in that long, long line. Where were you when they taught us that?”

Arlene had been in the family way for a little more than a month when she began weighing the pros and cons of an abortion. “I am trying to think of it as I have been trained to do,” she wrote the headmistress Dr. Hines. “The word ‘zygote’ keeps playing in my head over and over. But lately I have been giving the zygote names. It looks into my eyes sometimes and dares me to blink first. It swims and I call it by name back from the edge of the pool because it has swum too far. Beyond the edge, there are dragons and monsters because that world is not round but flat.”

One thing happened that caused her to have the child. And that same thing told her to give the child to Scott to raise. On the better days at the National Institutes of Health, she took her lunch on the grounds under an oak tree as far from people as she could manage. On a day in April, three months pregnant, she smelled the storm before there was a cloud in the sky. She continued eating and did not stop until the rain came, not a bad rain, just one that told her it was best to stand rather than to sit. There was no one about. After she stood, the thunder and lightning followed, which surprised her because the rain had not signaled that kind of storm. She decided to stay under the tree. Then, in seconds, as the storm grew fiercer, she heard two people laughing and talking on the other side of the oak.

She at first thought to walk away, but chose not to. After all, they were the invaders. And so, with the world quaking with the storm, she went around to confront the two. “Leave!” she shouted to them. “Leave this place!” They were a black girl and a white boy, not yet out of high school. It was evident that the boy was losing the war against his pimples. He did not seem to understand what Arlene was saying, but the girl said, “What is your problem, madam?” The newspaper article would come out with the girl’s photograph—a face much lovelier than Arlene would remember, and that was because the black girl was defiant the day of the storm, and that defiance was not lovely. “What is the matter with you, madam?” The white boy said, “Let’s just go, ma chérie, ” which was what his grandfather called his grandmother. The article would not have his photograph because he was not killed.

“Let’s just go, ma chérie, ” the boy said again, and he began walking away in the storm as an example to the girl, a scholarship student at an awfully expensive prep school not far from NIH. The boy had gone but three yards when Arlene decided simply to go back to her side of the tree. “Suit yourself,” she said before leaving. “Suit yourself,” the girl mocked. The boy was five yards away when the earth quivered and the wind swept through and then the lightning came, down into the tree and down into the girl. After the sound of the lightning hitting them, there was nothing except a slight yelp from the girl and an ancient complaint from the tree and a cry from the boy as he ran toward her. The tree, wounded, began tumbling toward the boy, and whatever sounds he made after that were swallowed up by all the young spring leaves.

Arlene sank to her knees in a fit of crying, shivering as the heat from the lightning began to dissipate. Even after years of it, the incredible wonder of it still had the power to pull her down. She heard people on the other side of the tree rushing toward the couple. Her child came into the world in October, a late baby. A boy she and Scott agreed to call Antonio. Arlene tucked her purse under her arm and stood, now afraid that others would be hurt because the storm had not let up, and she stumbled down along the iron fence of the NIH grounds and eventually found a gate that took her out to Wisconsin Avenue. The baby was born bald, and then, in his ninth month of life, when Arlene gave him to Scott to raise, Antonio’s hair came out, nearly an inch in one week.

She caught a cab some five blocks from NIH, hoping as she got in that the driver would complain about her wet clothes so she could tear him apart. The man said nothing. The picture of the dead girl in the newspaper would be a recent one, and as Arlene read about her, about what a grand future people had predicted for her, Arlene thought what a poorer world it would be without Antoinette Champion. The cabdriver, black and old, delivered her to the front door of her condominium, and he must have known something was the matter because after he helped her out of the taxi, he stood at the door as she tried first one key and then another to open the door.

On the Fourth of July some eleven years after the birth of Arlene’s son, Avis M. Watkins, nine years old, spent most of the morning on the floor of her room in a three-bedroom house on Minnesota Avenue, N.E., sulking and telling all her troubles to three stuffed animals. The girl was the youngest child of Marvella Simms, who, three years after her divorce, had returned to her maiden name. The child was upset that morning because Marvella had told her, for the fifth time, that there would be no fireworks at home, that they were going down to the Washington Monument to watch the display with Francisco Padmore, her mother’s fiancé. Avis liked Francisco, she confessed to the animals that morning, but the girl liked fireworks even more. “We all need some fireworks,” Avis told the black bear as she took the back of its head and shook it twice. They, she and the animals, were under one of the windows, and the sun came down through that window and caught the bear’s blue eye and made it twinkle as he nodded.

“Wouldn’t you like to hold one of them sparklers insteada watchin stuff shootin up in the air?” she asked the bear, who nodded yes. The child, her parents had decided, was recovering quite well from what Avis’s therapist had called “that unfortunate episode,” which had occurred nearly a year ago. “Me too,” she said to the bear. “You and me both.” The night of the “episode,” she had stayed at the Harvard Street, N.W., home of her best friend, and during an hour long before dawn, the friend’s father, estranged from the mother, had broken into the home while everyone was sleeping. “When I get grown I’ma do all I wanna do and nobody will say no.” The father shot to death the mother, his mother-in-law, his wife’s boyfriend, and his own five children. Avis survived with no wounds, covered in her friend’s blood, enough blood for the father to think in the near-darkness that she had been shot. This was her first miracle. “Make me go down to some stupid fireworks show.” The father had only one daughter, Avis’s friend, but for those moments after he shot into the bed with his daughter and Avis, he looked at Avis, who kept her eyes closed and breathed shallowly through it all, and the man, insane because his wife’s love for him had shriveled down to nothing, thought he had two girls and said to himself that two dead daughters were better than one because it would hurt his father-in-law even more.