Edward Jones - All Aunt Hagar's Children

Kenyon laughed, and then Matthew trailed behind him seconds later with his own laughter. Matthew, father to the child Amy, had been three days sober, was trying to stay sober for his little girl. And when he was sober he processed everything a mite slower, or so all his friends said. Actually, it was simply that the world wasn’t very funny when he wasn’t drinking. Matthew was in that beer garden because he figured that if Jesus could resist temptation in the desert with the Devil dogging him, then he, lowly Matthew, could face temptation in a bar. But the Devil had gotten smarter in two thousand years, and now he had less to work with.

“I got the best hands. Capable hands,” Kenyon said, and Matthew slapped him on the back and went back to his Pepsi-Cola at the bar. Matthew didn’t drink anything stronger that night, but the Devil sat down next to him the next night. It took the gray-suited Devil only eight minutes, and it wasn’t long before Amy’s father was raising his glass of rum and soda and singing to an applauding bar:

Pepsi-Cola hits the spot

12 ounces that’s a lot

Twice as much for a nickel, too,

Pepsi-Cola is the drink for you.

“Mind if I have a seat?” Kenyon said, already on the way to sitting down before she could answer.

“It’s a free country,” Georgia said.

“Everywhere but in your space. Can I buy you a beer?”

“Sure,” Georgia said. “But why don’t you wait till I’m finished this one.”

He looked at how much was still in her glass and said, “Then you don’t plan on kickin me away from your table any time soon.”

“I don’t know. It depends on how much you get on my nerves. I might kick you out, but your beer gonna stay.” He laughed and she laughed. The last woman Kenyon Morrison was boyfriend to was even now in the house of her childhood on East Capitol Street, N.E., recovering from a broken jaw and a dislocated eye socket. The pain medicine the D.C. General people had prescribed gave her nightmares, and she would wake and scream that she had to hide from Jesus. After she had been beaten up the last time and her jaw made to wobble from side to side like a rickety streetcar and her eye threatening to become mush, she and her children had to move in with her parents because she could not care for them anymore. “I love you, Kenyon,” she said to the ambulance attendant through a delirium of pain on the way to D.C. General. “I love you.” The woman and her nightmares had set the house of her childhood on edge, and her little girl and her little boy were failing life and her parents, who had never raised their hands to each other, thought that this would be their lot for the rest of their days—caring for a once-upona-time good and strong woman who had had so much promise but now was going insane in the light blue room she had been happy in as a girl.

“Oh, so thas how it gonna be, huh?” Kenyon said. “Love my beer but don’t love me.”

“I didn’t say that,” Georgia said and took a large sip of the beer that would be the last she would buy for herself that night. “I didn’t say that atall. Don’t you be puttin words in my mouth.”

“I’m sorry. I wouldn’t do that. It’s just that the idea of you kickin me away made me kinda sad, thas all.”

“Awww, sweetums. I apologize. Okay? Does that feel better? I’m sorry.”

“I don’t know if I’m ready to cept your pology yet. We’ll see. We’ll just have to see.” He was a very handsome man and had teeth so beautiful that women often thought at first that they were false. But he would click them for a woman, and she knew right off that they were real. Georgia prided herself on not being one to go for looks in a man, but that was not true, and any of her friends—from Martha Smith to Frieda Carson to Cornelia Walsh—would have said so.

Kenyon moved into Georgia’s place at 459 Ridge Street, N.W., eighteen days after they met. “I know it’s sudden,” Georgia told Cornelia Walsh. It was the Sunday before he moved in, and Cornelia and her daughter Lydia had come to visit. Lydia was in the big easy chair next to the window, playing with her Chatty Cathy doll, listening and not listening to the grown folks. “My name is Lydia and I live in Washington,” the girl sang, bouncing the doll on her knees. “Lydia is my name and Washington is my city.”

“Well, just be careful,” said Cornelia, a religious woman whose one dream was to see the Holy Land before she died. Her daughter had promised her that she would become a doctor and make enough money to take her there.

About then Kenyon knocked at the door and Georgia got up from the couch to let him in. Tomorrow, before twilight, he would have his own key. He came in and Georgia introduced him to Cornelia and her daughter Lydia and he shook Cornelia’s hand and told her he had heard what a good and fine woman she was and then he pinched Lydia’s cheek and told her she would be as pretty as her mother one day. Sooner, he added, if she drank her milk every day. “Whas that dolly’s name?” he asked, still leaning toward the girl and her doll. He stood up straight before she could answer and told Georgia he didn’t want to be late for that double feature at the Gem, that she’d better get herself ready and tell her company she’d see them another day. Georgia started to say something, but she didn’t think it was worth the effort, and besides, he had dressed up nice to take her to the moving picture show.

Downstairs out on the street, the child Amy Witherspoon said Hi to Georgia and Cornelia and Lydia, and then everyone had to say Hi back to her and her two little friends, Carlos Newman and Ethel Brown. Georgia asked Ethel how her mother was because her mother had been doing poorly since she had her second child, and Ethel said she was doing better and that the baby was going to be christened Saturday, no maybe not Saturday but Sunday if her grandmother got down in time from Philadelphia, which was in Pennsylvania, Miss Georgia, you know. And Georgia said she was glad to hear that. Kenyon stood to the side of everyone, the sweetness was gone from his Juicy Fruit gum, and he wanted another stick real bad. Then the two women listened as the two girls talked about their dolls and Amy said she had left her doll at home to rest up from the big Princess ball that was held last night, and the two women looked at each other in a ain’t-that-cute way and the boy Carlos popped three big bubbles with his Bazooka bubble gum, which still had plenty of sweetness left. The third pop made Kenyon grab Georgia’s shoulder and tell her loudly that he didn’t want to miss that gotdamn double feature at that gotdamn Gem Theater. And Ethel went Oohh oohh you said a bad word and Kenyon walked away toward 5th Street.

“I best get on,” Georgia said to everyone, but especially to Cornelia, her friend of fifteen years.

“I talk to you later,” Cornelia said and Georgia went off after Kenyon, who was only a few feet from 5th. The Gem was playing something with Robert Taylor and he liked Taylor, liked him even more than he liked John Garfield.

“I tell my mama you asked bout her,” Ethel shouted to Georgia. “We still waitin on my grandma from Philadelphia, down in Pennsylvania….” Ethel’s mother had been a Crenshaw before marriage, and everyone in the neighborhood said that if you married a Crenshaw you had a good partner for life, that they were true and blue and everything one might want in a good wife or a good husband. You could take that to the bank and they wouldn’t blink when they gave you a million dollars on it.

The four of them, the woman and the boy and the two girls, watched Georgia catch up with Kenyon and shift her pocketbook to her right hand and slip her left arm through his. He was walking a bit away from the curb, not giving her enough room to walk between him and the houses on the right, and so she had to bump bump bump him with her hip toward the curb because etiquette required that a woman walk on the inside and a man walk on the outside to protect her from whatever might come from the street and the gutter. Kenyon resisted because even as they walked, he could see Robert Taylor already up on the Gem’s screen saying and doing things that made his heart flutter and his brain go Yeah, yeah, thas the way to do it, Bobby. You tell em.