Edward Jones - All Aunt Hagar's Children

In the late afternoon of the Fourth of July, they—Avis, her mother, and her two brothers, Marvin and Marcus—drove to Francisco’s house in Anacostia, a house his grandfather had built. They had a late lunch. Francisco was also divorced, a man who worked three floors up from Marvella at the telephone company, and though she had seen him about for three or so years, she had not noticed him until he sang “Ave Maria” at the company Christmas party. (“That dude got pipes!” Marcus said at the party.) He had no children. They drove to the Stadium-Armory Metro station in Francisco’s Cadillac. (“Man,” Marcus said during the ride, “I could live in this thing if it had a bathroom and a TV.”) Of Marvella’s children, Avis was Francisco’s favorite because she was the first to like him, had silently taken his hand three months after she first met him as the five of them strolled out of a movie theater.

After the fireworks show on the Mall, they went back to the subway at the Federal Triangle stop, hoping to avoid the hordes at both Smithsonian stations. Arlene Baxter and Scott Catrell were there as well; their son, Antonio, was staying the summer with Scott’s people in Philadelphia. “Go out with Daddy,” her son had told Arlene before he left. “Hundreds die after fireworks explode prematurely,” she read in her mind as he spoke. She and Scott had sat across Constitution Avenue from the crowds, practically alone on the lawn of the Commerce Department. She enjoyed the time with Scott and was not thinking as they arrived at the Federal Triangle subway platform a minute or so before Marvin, Marcus and Avis Watkins. The children had pushed ahead of Marvella and Francisco. He told them to wait, but the children were quickly separated from the adults, mainly by a large family from Seat Pleasant. The platform lights began to blink, announcing the approaching train, and one of the Seat Pleasant boys bumped into Marcus because someone was bumping into him. Marcus turned and pushed the boy back. “Yall tryin to squeeze me to death in this damn place!” Marcus shouted to no one in particular.

When he turned back, Arlene and Avis had tumbled over the platform. Scott reached for them but was too late. The people who saw them down, down on the tracks were stunned for a long moment, stunned to see human beings in the no-man’s-land of the subway system where riders had never seen humans before, not even workmen. The blinking went on, and the entire platform cooled with wind pushed ahead by the coming train. People began reaching for the woman and the girl, but the confusion of arms and hands and the pushing and shouting only made things worse, and a man warned everyone that more would be falling to their deaths, and for several crucial seconds the bodies at the platform’s edge leaned as one away from death. Arlene, realizing even in her panic that she herself would be saved, sought to lift the girl, but her arms, bruised and weakened from the fall, failed her. She heard the roar and thought the train was only feet away but when she looked to face it, there was nothing but forever blackness through the tunnel. Blackness and then, suddenly, the lights of the train bearing down like the eyes of a creature not to be denied. The train shook the ground and it shook all the hearts of those who knew the woman and the girl were done for. Seeing that the girl could not get back up to the platform in time, Arlene knelt and grabbed the waist of the girl and Avis, knowing the woman could not get to safety, turned and grabbed Arlene back and they fell down and Arlene rolled with her into the recess under the platform. She pushed Avis as close as she could to the wall and covered the girl with her body. Up on the platform, the blinking went on. Scott bowed his head. Three men six feet from the edge of the platform fainted, but the crowd was so thick they had nowhere to fall. Marvella and Francisco leaned forward but could not get close to the children. Marcus moaned to see his sister disappear, then he cursed, and so did his brother as he gripped Marcus protectively by the shirt collar. The face of the first car emerged from the tunnel and the woman running the train saw the chaos and the people only inches from the edge of the platform and she sounded her horn. The brakes, a screeching mess, were of no use, but still the subway woman tried. As the train came on, Avis, having survived a night that saw the murders of eight human beings, knew somehow that she would not die, and so there arose a need to protect the stranger holding her and she put one arm around Arlene’s shoulder and one hand behind the woman’s head and pulled it into the crook of her own neck. Dust and dirt stirred up by the oncoming train coated them, pushed into their nostrils and their ears. And with wind and noise and debris, the train arrived.

Arlene’s telephone number was unlisted, but Avis begged her mother to help her to reach her and Marvella, the telephone company worker, got it. For some three weeks, the child left the same message: “Lady, would you please call me? I’m the girl at the subway.” They had last seen each other that night at George Washington University Hospital. Avis did not know what she would say if Arlene ever called back; she only knew she wanted to hear the woman’s voice again. After word spread about what had happened, with reporters setting up camp outside her home, wanting to talk to “the Miracle Woman,” Arlene had left her home a day after the incident and had gone to stay with Scott. The reporters spoke to Avis, but two days after seeing his child on television and in the newspapers, Avis’s father called Marvella and told her no more of that. He had despaired to see his daughter in one television interview, tiny and in a pretty blue dress, sitting on her couch between her mother and her brothers. Her responses reduced mostly to the shaking of the head and Yeses and Nos. “This is one reason why I divorced that woman,” the father said to the television screen. “Lady, would you please call me? I was at the subway with you.”

The newspapers said Arlene had saved the child, because that is what Avis told them, but as Arlene sat day after day in the dark at Scott’s place, she became less certain of what she had done. By the second week, she started thinking that the child had actually saved her, which was not how the world worked. She began to long for the girl, for her presence, and had she known the girl had been calling, she would have called her back. Perhaps they had saved each other, she thought.

Near the end of the second week, Scott went to Arlene’s home to collect her mail. He called her and told her the telephone message machine was full. She called her number and retrieved the messages. To hear the child broke her heart. She had heard the voice before, but she had heard it years and years before, and it had belonged to someone who was not alive anymore. Arlene was in her sixth decade of miracles.

They—Marvella and her children—came to Scott’s apartment that first Saturday in August when Scott had gone to Philadelphia to get Antonio. Avis stared at the woman and held back and leaned against the door once Arlene shut it. Marvella said, “You been dyin to see her all this time and now the cat got your tongue.”

Arlene seated them on the couch facing the long window in the living room, but Marcus soon got up to look out the window onto Massachusetts Avenue and down 13th Street. “You live pretty high up,” he said of the tenth-floor apartment, “but my uncle lives even higher in Maryland.” Arlene sat in the love seat catty-corner the couch. She and Avis did not take their eyes off each other. “Oh,” Arlene said to Marcus, who returned to the couch. “He live out in Maryland and they not afraid to put up high places. But in D.C., they pretty scared of bein high.” He looked up at his brother, but Marvin, sitting between his siblings, said nothing.