Edward Jones: All Aunt Hagar's Children

No one ever came to claim the baby, and before long Aubrey, no longer blessed with guiltless sleep because of the baby crying in the night, went the other way when he heard Ruth approaching those quiet corners. He began to devote even more time to trying to find who might have “lost” a baby boy. By February he was even knocking on the back doors of white people to find out, as he put it, if they had heard tell of someone who was in the family way and now was not but had no baby to show for it. By February, too, he was resenting Ruth for having so easily made a home for the baby with them in that big front room. From that first night she had put the baby in the wooden crib one of her older brothers had created, a small thing of absolute beauty with cherubs carved on the sides, cherubs doing everything from throwing balls to jumping rope to sitting on tree limbs. A cherub with closed eyes and upraised arms and wings unfurled sat with his fat crossed ankles on the crib’s headboard. The crib had always been intended for their own first child, but now day after day Aubrey could see the orphan sleeping in it, his arms spread without a care in the world, his belly fat with milk Aubrey himself had taken from the humpbacked cow Joan rented to make the butter she sold.

It was in late April that he began to think that Ruth was not getting pregnant because her heart was too much with the orphan. (“Don’t call him Miles,” he had finally told her in March. “Don’t call him nothin. Whoever come to get him will wanna give him back his real name, and the boy’ll just haveta get used to bein called somethin else.” Ruth had sighed, the same way she did in the old days when she was about to fall asleep.) And it was in April that he began to seek her out during the workday to take her wherever he found her alone. The force and frequency of his seed would overpower her heart’s fondness for the tree baby. A guest came upon them in one of the upstairs rooms in the 1011 house and complained to Joan. “What kinda damn place yall think I’m runnin here?” she demanded of Ruth and Aubrey. “You can take that mess back to Virginia.” All the while she spoke, she seemed about to cry, as if their doing it in broad open daylight like that was only a small part of what was troubling her.

When Aubrey took Ruth at night in their bed, he no longer waited to hear Blind Willie start to snore. In early May she screamed for the first time with the brutality of it. “I won’t let you touch me no more if you keep hurtin me,” she said one morning as she fed the orphan, the baby’s eyes blinking sleepily, one hand raised to touch her mouth. “I’ll do it right from now on,” Aubrey said quietly, but his word lasted only three days. By the time Ruth got word in late May that her mother was ailing, she had not let him touch her in more than a week. They had quarreled all that week, mostly at night, and though Aubrey tried to contain his shouting, Blind Willie could hear them. He would knock on the wall. “Yall be good to one nother in there, you hear? Ain’t no call for yall not bein good to one nother.”

She took the orphan when she went to see about her mother, ignoring Aubrey when he asked what he should do when the baby’s mother came back to get the child. In Virginia she found peace again, found she could shake off the unsettling way Washington had insinuated itself in her nerves, something that had happened long before she cut the baby down. She helped her father and brothers with the crops. Once her mother improved, the two took the orphan in the buggy and went all about Arlington, visiting people Ruth had not seen in many months. The world in Virginia kept telling her that marriage and Washington had been good for her. Ruth said yes, yes they had. She learned to tell people right away that Miles was not hers, that she had found him in a tree. Then people, the same people who said Washington had been good to her, would tsk-tsk and say what could anyone expect of a city with a president who was so mean to colored people. She slept with the orphan in the bed she had slept in before her marriage. The baby slept holding tightly to her nightgown. May became June, and then before she could turn around, it was July.

Aubrey sent her a letter:

My dear Wife,

I write with all hope that your dear Mother is taking well once again. I have prayed for Her. I have prayed for You and I have prayed for the Life We have tried to make for ourselves here in the City.

I do not sleep because You are not beside me. I work but I am not happy because I know that I cannot find You quick as I could before You left for your sick Mother and Virginia. I want more than living tomorrow to come to get You before the second day of August, 1902. Please know that I write these words with my Heart true in every word. I will come out to get You.

To my loving Wife Mrs. Ruth Patterson

From Your true and one Husband

Mr. Aubrey Patterson

She read the letter a dozen times the day she received it. That night, after the house was quiet and the baby fast asleep, she went outside, not so much because of the song—though it played on still—but because standing in the yard might bring Aubrey quicker than the second of August.

He came and stayed with her and her family for three days. For some reason he seemed surprised to see the baby, as if he had expected it to have simply disappeared over time. He thought the baby twice as large as he had been before leaving Washington. The same size might have been the most he could ever hope for, but to have blossomed, to appear twice its size, was a blow to the heart. But he said nothing.

While Ruth was away, Joan had increased Aubrey’s pay to $2.50 a week. Had he been asked the day he held the new pay in his hand, he would have said that he was now a Washingtonian. Virginia was way over there somewhere in the past. He would not have returned to Virginia to be a man for anything in the world except the resurrection of his father. The only thing that could make his living perfect was Ruth’s return. There was a terrible part of him that resented her for being absent for so long, though he could understand about her mother. A woman on I Street owed Joan some money, and she sent Aubrey to collect it. The woman opened her door to invite him in, and he sensed that she wanted to give more than the money. He hesitated, looked all the way up and down I Street, where no one knew him or his business. His father had said once that even if he were ten thousand miles from any human being, he must still sit and eat at his table with a knife and fork and use his eating manners the way he had been taught. So he told the woman that if she didn’t have the money that day, he would just tell his aunt. And he banked his pay, every penny except that used to buy sweets, which he could not live without.

Also while Ruth was away, Joan hired Earl Austin, a man only four months up from Georgia. Suffering headaches in Georgia, Earl had gone to a root doctor, and the woman, after having Earl spit on a plate painted black, had diagnosed, “Your wife ain’t your wife no more.” Free of headaches but with a heart sliced up, he fled the state after catching his wife in their marriage bed with a man still in his hat and socks and then beating the man for nearly an hour and leaving him for dead in his wife’s spring garden. He knew how to blacksmith, he had told Joan when seeking a job, and he could even sew and crochet if that would put food in his belly. He did not say that he had seen her one day walking down K Street and had followed her all the way back to 3rd Street. He did not say that he was quitting a good porter job at the Ebbitt House just to be near her, that he had been seized that day on K Street by an emotion that overwhelmed and confused him. He did not say that he would have worked for free or that he knew that even in a thousand years he had no hope of reaching the heart of a woman like her, one with money and property.