Edward Jones - All Aunt Hagar's Children

Ihad a little talk with Dr. Imogene day fore yesterday,” Maddie said to Glynnis. They were alone in Dr. Holloway’s kitchen. “She said give you all the love she has in her.” It was Sunday morning in October, and Maddie had come at Glynnis’s invitation to talk about what Maddie could do now that Alberta might not need the same kind of care. Glynnis’s parents were at church, and they would be there most of the day. The doctor had been thinking that Maddie might assist in the basement office, especially with patients who would, with word spreading, come in search of help that came out of small mason jars, help from plants that were now growing in the backyard on either side of the lovely, winding path. She had spoken with Jesse only a few days before, because, strangely, the plants that received the most light were not doing as well as those with less light.

“How is she?” Glynnis asked. “I’ll be calling her tonight. If I don’t speak to her at least twice a week, I feel out of touch.” Jesse had promised to come up that coming week. The problem, he had said of the plants, might be a fixable case of “a failure to thrive” under the Washington sun.

“She’s well,” Maddie said. “We didn’t talk about you necessarily, Dr. Holloway, but somethin just stepped into my head no sooner I hung up that telephone. Somethin about Alberta.”

“Oh?” Glynnis said. They were drinking tea. Half a pinch of Imogene’s leaves in Maddie’s. Two full pinches in Dr. Holloway’s. It looks nice, Jesse was to say of her hair on Wednesday, as he stood less than a foot behind her. And she would say as she turned to face him, They treat you well at Cleopatra’s Hair Emporium. It would not be Dr. Jesse.

“Yes. It occurred to me to wonder, Dr. Holloway, if you knew just how all the witches and everything started with your mother. Was there such a such somethin that happened on such a such a day that you can remember? Did Alberta bother such a such somebody without even knowin it?”

“No. I can’t think of Mama hurting a living soul. You know her.”

“I do. I do. I know her heart. I know my patient well,” Maddie said and took her saltless cracker and dipped it into her cup and put the cracker into her mouth.

Glynnis told Maddie she knew where it had started, but very little beyond that, and Maddie dipped another saltless cracker into the cup. This one dissolved immediately and she had to spoon it out bit by bit and ate. She looked up at Glynnis with the last bit and said in a most offhanded way, as if the idea had only that second come to her, “Maybe if we went there, somethin might come back to you. That is, if you have a little time.” The doctor knew enough by then to take seriously any suggestion from this woman. “It ain’t a bad day out there.”

Long before they reached 1st Street, N.E., Glynnis found that so much had changed, disappeared, but everything that was important to white people remained. Gonzaga High School. The railroad. After 1st Street, she saw that many of the places she had known as a girl were still standing, and that gave her heart some relief. She turned off K onto 6th and found a parking space and then she and Maddie walked down to K and turned east, toward the house at 727 where she as a girl had lived on the second floor. She recalled some houses from childhood as they went along, though many had been renovated and repainted. She had expected more white faces, but there were not very many. At the corner of 7th and K, Glynnis looked back and then forward again and wondered if the world seemed smaller because she was bigger or because she knew more about that world. “It might be,” Maddie had said just before they crossed from Northwest into Northeast, “that our sweet Alberta was conjured and thas why the witches was ridin. Who can know the truth, Dr. Holloway?”

Glynnis, with Maddie only two feet behind her, stepped onto 7th Street and immediately a car horn honked. She looked to the left, saw a car heading toward her and was confused about what it meant until the car braked only a few feet from her. She jumped back and Maddie took her by the arm. The car rolled forward and the driver leaned across the seat and said, “Sister, me and you both glad it wasn’t your day.” Glynnis, still somewhat confused, said quietly, “I’m on K Street. I’m walking on K Street, mister.” The man blinked, looked at Maddie, sat up straight and went on.

The doctor crossed 7th Street and Maddie followed. A woman was coming toward them. Beside her was a boy on a small bicycle. On the woman’s black sweatshirt were the red and green words IT’S A BLACK THING.…The boy, unlike any of the children when she was growing up, was wearing a helmet. Jack fell down and didn’t break his crown…. The woman with the boy said Good afternoon and Maddie nodded and Glynnis only partly understood the words and could manage nothing more than a smile. A smile because though she didn’t know all of what the woman was saying, she still didn’t want the woman to think her parents had not given her the proper home training. The woman and the boy passed and Glynnis turned and looked at them. The back of the woman’s sweatshirt offered the red and green words…YOU WOULDN’T UNDERSTAND. At the 7th Street corner, the two stopped and the woman leaned to the side and cupped her hand over the boy’s shoulder farthest from her.

When the doctor turned back, she found that she was in front of 727 and she looked up to the second floor to see her mother standing between the parted blue curtains, blowing a kiss at her. Alberta was healthy, and Glynnis knew that because when she looked down K she saw herself at ten walking hand in hand with her father toward 8th Street. All that week of being ten her father had promised her a Saturday of shopping and a movie at the Atlas theater and a half smoke from Mile Long as they went up and down the busy commercial H Street. Just him and her, and no going away to work for him. She looked up again at Alberta, who blew her another kiss. She looked back down K and saw Maddie several feet behind, her hands behind her back. There was no look on Maddie’s face that Glynnis could decipher.

And when she turned around, she saw a woman come around the corner of 8th and K. Morton took off his hat as he did with all women and he and the woman began talking. Had Glynnis let go of her father’s hand and gone to the corner, she might have been able to look down toward H and see all the excitement of a Saturday on H Street. The happy children. The Atlas announcing in big letters on its marquee what extraordinary movie awaited a child just steps beyond the ticket booth. And candy without end that might rot a girl’s teeth on any other day of the week, but not on a special Saturday.

The woman Morton was talking to had five children and a husband dying of a disease that was squeezing his lungs into balls no bigger than a child’s fists. In fifteen years they would have a cure for that. Alberta and Morton had given the family money and groceries because once upon a time the family had done well and Alberta and Morton knew that that could be their lot one day. “Go by and see Alberta,” Morton said to the woman, “and set your troubles aside for a bit. A little coffee, a little pastry might be just the medicine for a nice Saturday mornin.” The woman said that was where she was headed, to thank Alberta for the ham. “We’ll eat for days.” And down on H Street there was Morton’s Department Store, which Glynnis and Morton always joked was owned by him, but it had to be kept secret or the world would come knocking at his door wanting free clothes. Glynnis the girl thought she could hear the H Street gaiety, could smell the half smokes and hot dogs, could see some undeserving girl getting some dress that would be perfect for her.