Edward Jones - All Aunt Hagar's Children

But Morton and the woman talked on, for hours and hours and hours, it seemed, and not a single word of it was as important as H Street, and all the people passed on either side of them, no doubt heading down beyond I Street to H where everything wonderful was happening. The sun grew higher and all the precious time in the world drifted on by the girl who was destined to become a doctor. In the end, Glynnis, squirming as the pleasures sailed out of reach, said to the woman, “You so black and fat and ugly, I don’t know why my daddy even talkin to you,” and she pulled impatiently at her father’s hand. “I wish your black self was dead.” The woman, injured deep, all the way into the bone, could manage only a nearly silent “What?” She fell back half a step. “I meant to do no harm,” the woman said to Morton, as if he shared what his daughter, in her pretty dress and her pretty shoes, was thinking.

The woman went back the way she had come. “Millie, wait now,” Morton said, but in a twinkle the woman was gone. Morton jerked on Glynnis’s hand as people came and went on K Street. “Child,” he said, “whas done got into you? You lost your ever lovin mind?” Had a root worker, on her way to get eggs and milk or meet up with her boyfriend or take coffee with a relative, heard Glynnis and decided to come to Millie’s aid? Les teach that naughty child a lesson.

Glynnis watched as Morton and the child she had been came back to 727. He was shaking with each step and he was calling for Alberta, who was darker than Millie. And the day—and many days after—was dead for Glynnis. She had bragged all that week to friends about the day she would have with her father, about all the things she would get. Less than two months later, the witches began riding Alberta.

Dr. Holloway, with Maddie still several feet behind her, now walked to 8th and looked down toward H and saw and heard nothing special. Had Millie gone to some root worker and asked for help in getting rid of Alberta so Morton would be free to be with her? But that was not the Millie she remembered. No, perhaps it had begun with her, with the future physician who wished the poor woman dead. Glynnis’s words heard by some mischievous or well-meaning root worker strolling by, a misguided woman from the same school of roots attended by the worker in North Carolina who listened outside windows at night. Maddie came up behind Glynnis and called her by her full name without the doctor title, and Glynnis heard her. Yes, perhaps a passing root worker who had heard Glynnis that Saturday morning and seen Millie’s pain and was determined to set the world straight. A root doctor who did not know or care about the facts and history of the case, but had decided nevertheless to prescribe, to grant, unasked, the lonely woman abused by a child—however innocent, however good and obedient all the other days of the year—one wish for free. Granted the wish with a brew of mumbo-jumbo and an innocent mother’s hair and fingernail clippings and God only knew what else scrounged from the trash in the witch deadness of night. Granted the wish and then never came back to review and perhaps undo what she had done.

Seven-year-old Amy Witherspoon, only child of Idabelle and Matthew Witherspoon, knew pretty Miss Georgia real well, pretty Miss Georgia with all her precious clothes and her precious shoes, but the girl didn’t know very much about the man who knocked Miss Georgia down the stairs in July 1955. Amy had never paid much attention to the man before that Saturday afternoon she looked up from the stoop leading to the stairs to Georgia’s place, up from being on her foursies while playing jacks with Ethel Brown, and saw the man at the top of Miss Georgia’s stairs, his fists balled up and his face full of meanness.

As it happened, the man who knocked Miss Georgia down the stairs had been introduced to the pretty woman just two weeks before by Amy’s own daddy at the What Ailing Ya beer garden at the southwest corner of 5th and M Streets, N.W. Georgia Evans was her parents’ third child, and before she left home, she had never seen any sky but the sky over Scottsboro, Alabama. Georgia had been married three times, but her mama and daddy had never seen the third man in the flesh because he was killed not long after the honeymoon in 1953 by a blind man who claimed he was shooting at someone else. The parents had a picture of the third husband with his arm around Georgia, taken the day before he died; it was stuck in their mirror frame just above the one of their youngest child in his high school graduation cap and gown.

Georgia had always considered the corners of 5th and M as her lucky corners. One night in a rainstorm, she had found a diamond ring on the ground in front of the liquor store on the northeast corner, and on the southwest corner she had met her second husband as she came out of the Goldbergs’ basement grocery store. “Ma’am, do you know which way is Ridge Street?” the man who would be her second husband asked, arrayed in a blue sharkskin suit. “I sure do. I live on Ridge Street. Just come this way.” He was a good husband, brought his paycheck home to her for many years, but he was forever homesick for Mississippi, and that was what did in their love, or so the children—who got it secondhand by listening in on grown folks’ conversations—on Ridge Street said.

“Georgia, this here my friend Kenyon,” Amy Witherspoon’s father Matthew said the night he introduced her to the man who would knock her down the stairs and dare her to get up and come up for some more. It was a Thursday and the What Ailing Ya wasn’t very crowded. Georgia was one of three women in the beer garden, the only unattached one, and for more than a half an hour she had been drinking beer in a corner booth a few feet from the jukebox, thinking about what numbers she would play tomorrow. Her pet number, 459, had come out 549 that day, and she was upset because she hadn’t played it in a combination and had lost $200. She had planned to go straight home from being a maid all day at the hotel at 14th and Pennsylvania Avenue, but something told her to take in a beer in the same spot where she had first met her last boyfriend, and then, two months later in the same booth, told him to kiss her ass before kissing the Devil’s ass. She wasn’t necessarily looking for a boyfriend that night she met Kenyon.

“Hi you do, Georgia? Thas a pretty name,” Kenyon said. Then he told his first lie: “Georgia my favorite state.” He actually hated the state of Georgia because it had executed his uncle, an armless man who was as innocent as Jesus Christ. Kenyon was kind of tall, depending upon how much leaning he did, and he was as light-skinned as Sweet Daddy Grace, whose church at 6th and M Georgia sometimes attended. She went to that church only because she admired Sweet Daddy’s long fingernails. Kenyon was a chauffeur and he had on his dark gray chauffeur suit. “And another damn thing,” Georgia would say after he had slapped her three times that Saturday afternoon and before he knocked her down the stairs, “why don’t you get another suit? I’m sick and tired of seein you traipsin round here in that one.”

“Thank you, Kenyon,” Georgia said after he told her she had a pretty name. She took a big swig of her beer because she knew another would soon be on the way. “Thank you very much. It was my mama’s mama’s name. Kenyon is a nice name, too. And thas a nice suit you wearin there.”

“Just my everyday-go-to-work clothes.”

“Oh? What kinda work you do, Kenyon?”

“Well,” Matthew said. “I see you in good hands, Georgia, so I’m gonna leave you two to get acquainted.”

“Good hands?” Georgia said. She was at the top of her second beer, and that was always the point where everything in the world started looking like Christmas morning after the second of ten gifts had been opened. “A girl sometimes needs more than good hands. She needs them capable hands.”