Edward Jones - All Aunt Hagar's Children

Sandra now pointed across the road and waved at Glynnis, who nodded. Then the bus driver spoke to the dreadlock man, who looked at Glynnis only a moment, as if unimpressed. He finally shook the driver’s hand and turned to the black car. His tied locks came down more than six inches below his neck and their tips flopped against his back as he moved. His hair reminded Glynnis of a mythological creature whose name escaped her as well. He drove to the edge of the lot and paused before going to Glynnis’s right. He did not look her way again.

Sandra returned to the bus, and Glynnis went back to the steps. She reached the top of the steps, one hand on the post, and as her mother’s laughter came to her through the light blue curtains that were blowing out the windows, through the tall lattice of the backs of the unmoving rocking chairs, the word also came to her. “I’ll hold you tight, Mama, and nothin will get you tonight, you’ll see.” Many, many nights, after her mother began losing her mind, she had slept with her mother in her parents’ bed. To make ends meet, her father, after chauffeuring all day, had begun taking odd jobs from seven in the evening until about two in the morning. Cleaning the floors of the bakery where they made Wonder bread. Holding the lamps for the skilled men who went down into manholes at night to fix leaking pipes or to turn the electricity back on. Shine her a little brighter there, Morty. Just shine her that much brighter…. “I’ll hold you real tight, Mama. Don’t worry.” After Alberta told Glynnis about the riding witches, about how they came to her and threatened her family, the woman and the girl—slowly becoming mother to the mother—would plan how to fight the witches. She never told her husband. The fight amounted to no more than a Bible under Alberta’s pillow and a butcher’s knife under Glynnis’s pillow. Weapons from an old wives’ tale Alberta remembered from childhood. But they came anyway, after the two, exhausted, had fallen asleep. And in the day, from time to time, saying nothing to a sleeping Alberta, Glynnis would set out after the meanest girl in that K Street neighborhood, the meanest and the baddest among those who might have said something about her crazy-ass mama who shoulda had her flicted butt locked up in St. Elizabeths. Rocks, soda bottles, tree limbs, any weapon would do. Her fists still up, the toughest girl crying on the ground at her feet, Glynnis would sneer and threaten to beat them all up. The boys, liking her spunk, stayed out of it.

Imogene Satterfield was to say not a word about the fighting, but she would say, in six weeks, “They spit on the Bible, Dr. Holloway. Thas why it never helped. It ain’t but a bunch of pages anyway. If every single Bible just up and disappeared from the Earth, Dr. Holloway, just about every last one a us would drop off to the fires cause all we ever had was pages to walk on.” Imogene, that day, would test the moving water with the tip of the walking stick and then, in seconds it seemed to Glynnis, be on the other side. “And a witch ain’t got blood to spill so a butcher knife is nothin but paper to them.”

Glynnis now turned and looked about from the top of the porch. Jealousy was the word. Through all that time it had been her and her father who fought against the world. And when her father was away, she alone had barred the doors and dared the world and the witches to come in and touch one hair on her mother’s head. “I’ll hold you tight, Mama.” And then, just that quick, she would wake to her mother crying or screaming beside her. No one knew what she and her father had gone through. No one knew her mother’s pain. Not all the people at St. Elizabeths. She looked at Imogene’s garden and heard music from the bus. She closed her eyes. Certainly not a cross-eyed woman.

Maddie came out to the porch. She said, “Dr. Holloway, you feelin all right?”

“Yes. Yes, I am.” She opened her eyes. “I wanted to thank you for coming down with us.”

“I must go with my patient,” Maddie said. “I know you’d rather be someplace else on a vacation, Dr. Holloway, but sometimes black people from the South need to go back home. I’m sure your parents done said that.” They had not. She herself had never seen North Carolina before that day, and she could not remember if her parents had ever seen the state again after her birth. “We leave, we run away and don’t realize how much we’ll need to go back home one day. The South is like that. It’s the worst mama in the world and it’s the best mama in the world.” Maddie sighed and stepped closer. “Dr. Holloway, I needs to prepare you: she’ll bring up the subject of you and Miss Alberta stayin here with her tonight. I just want to let you know.”

“We have hotel rooms reserved, Maddie. For all of us, for you and Sandra, too.” The plan had been for Sandra to leave the next day with the bus and return for them in two weeks. But the plan Imogene had, as Maddie had guessed, was for Glynnis and Alberta to stay with Imogene. Morton could stay in the bus parked in a larger lot on the other side of the church. Close but not too close.

“I know bout them reservations, Dr. Holloway, but thas why they invented the phone, for times like these. To say, ‘I done changed my mind.’ I’ve called my cousin and he’ll take me and Sandra to his place.” Maddie touched Glynnis’s arm so that the younger woman was forced to turn and face her. “Dr. Holloway, your mama is fine and maybe we should let that go on right now.” They heard Imogene say something and then Alberta nearly shouted, “Yes, thas right. I almost forgot that, but that is right.”

Glynnis woke about nine in the morning in a tiny back room of Imogene’s house. She came from a dream in which several giggling girls were clustered in a corner talking about her mother. She, though a woman in the dream, was about to go to them and break it up. She had just raised her dukes when she told herself she was too old for such things and woke up. Glynnis sat on the side of the bed for several minutes and then went to the window and pulled aside the curtains and looked down at her mother and Imogene strolling through a garden far larger than the one at the front of the house. They were arm in arm and they were giggling and laughing. She did not feel the jealousy of the day before, and she wondered what could have gotten into her.

After she had showered and dressed in the bathroom adjoining the room where her mother had slept, she went downstairs. She was hungry but wary of eating anything in a voodoo woman’s house. She went through the cabinets and the icebox and saw nothing appetizing. As she looked, she was trying to remember more of the evening before. After the entire group had eaten in the kitchen, Maddie and Sandra had been picked up, and her father had gone across the road to the bus. The last thing she fully remembered was sitting with her mother on the couch as Imogene poured tea from a cracked pot. Imogene then sat in her easy chair and took from a sweater pocket a small jar. After the teaspoon of sugar, after the wedge of lemon, she sprinkled dull green crushed leaves from the jar into her own cup. “A little for me,” she said. “And a little less for you, sweet Alberta.” And then, as her hand hovered over Glynnis’s cup, she said, “And even less for the doctor from the state of Washington, D.C., where the president hangs his derby and picks his nose.” Alberta laughed and picked up her cup. “Pinky out now, honey, like them white folks do,” Imogene said. Alberta laughed again and Glynnis, before the leaves could fall, said she would pass on the tea.

The kitchen door had a window, and Glynnis could see her mother and Imogene, still arm in arm, come to the end of the garden. If the witches came during the night, she had not heard her mother scream. Beyond the garden, there was a wide field of green grass sprinkled with a few yellow and white flowers. Imogene raised her walking stick and pointed first right and then left. Alberta separated from Imogene and walked a few feet, pointed to the left and then turned and waved Imogene to her. The two entwined their arms again and stepped off to the left where, when the field ended, Glynnis could see the beginning of a kind of forest.