Edward Jones - All Aunt Hagar's Children

Judy Hathaway came up from the other side of Ridge Street and said Good afternoon to Cornelia, mentioned what a nice Sunday it was. Judy was sixty-seven years old, and if anyone in the neighborhood had to play a number, they went to her. She was the mother to four children, but they had all perished in their thirties, a child each year for four years in a row—breast cancer, heart attack, a questionable accident while in the navy, a self-inflicted wound to the temple. Judy knew what it was like to lose a child, Amy’s mother once said. “I couldn’t find a better godmother to look after my child.”

“Where you headed?” Cornelia asked Judy.

“Just round to the sto. Got a taste for some stew meat tonight.”

“That sounds just right,” Cornelia said. “I know where I’m eatin tonight.” Most colored people on Ridge Street ate chicken on Sunday, but Judy wasn’t most colored people.

“Can I come, too, Grandma?” the girl Ethel said. They were not blood kin, but nearly every child on Ridge Street who could speak called Judy Grandma. Carlos Newman was one of the few who didn’t. The boy had two grandmothers already, and he knew and loved them very well. But more than that, he was very new to Ridge Street and was just feeling his way. He, like Amy and Ethel, was seven years old.

Judy laughed at Ethel and swept the girl to her. “Sho. I make anough for everybody,” and she kissed the child not once, but three times about the cheek. At twenty-four Judy had killed her first husband way deep in the woods where they had lived and then she had run away from Arkansas, telling everyone she ever met that she was a child of Louisiana. The only witnesses to her murdering her husband were the animals they had around the place—the chickens the husband always threw his shoe at. The brown dog that whimpered to see his master dead in the kitchen; the same dog that always brought the shoe back. The white dog that followed Judy as she dragged the dead man out the back door and around the well and to the garden. She had fewer muscles than she would have when she arrived in Washington seventeen years later, so hauling her dead man around the garden would have taken her another half a day. Instead, to save time, she pulled her dead man through the garden, a ragged trail through that bed of perfect and ripe food, then out along the beaten path to the place behind the privy. The brown dog stayed home. The white dog did not follow through the garden because his master had trained him with sticks and stones not to go near the garden, so he took the long way to the grave. They had no neighbors to speak of. When it was time to leave—after the grave had settled so that anyone seeing it might think a body was the very last thing buried there—the white dog followed her quite eagerly, but the brown one would not go, despite all her pleading. “There ain’t nothin for you here anymore. Come with us.” But the brown creature knew what the white dog was to learn beyond Arkansas—that leaving that place could break your heart, even while traveling with a loved one.

“Well,” Cornelia said to Judy, “me and Lydia might as well come along to the sto since we goin that way anyway.”

“Can I come, too, Grandma?” Amy said, and Judy said the same thing to her that she had said to Ethel.

“Yall go tell somebody where you at then.” The two girls ran to their homes to tell somebody.

Carlos looked at Amy running away, then looked up at Judy, who said to him, “You can come, too, if you mama say so.” She did not know him very well, but that would change.

Carlos nodded and set off for home, across Ridge Street. He didn’t care about the store and Miss Judy and playing about on a bright Sunday, but he was in love with Amy Witherspoon and he could barely stand to be out of her presence. Amy knew he cared about her but always told people she was going to marry her daddy when she grew up. I just can’t marry you, she would tell Carlos, less my daddy died and I was a poor widow woman. Daddy being Matthew Witherspoon, who had returned to drink after the Devil sat down next to him at What Ailing Ya. Carlos knew marriage to her father would never happen, and he believed that if he held on long enough she would be his to marry. In three months he would be eight years old. His heart would not beat for very long on Ridge Street, but as long as it did, it would beat for Amy.

“I wish I could find me some nice greens,” Cornelia said. “I done had a taste for greens for the longest.”

“You and me both,” Judy said.

“I mean what I said bout comin over to supper,” Judy said. “Vinnie eat like a bird and I end up havin all them leftovers. Leftovers leftovers. Sometimes I think I’m gonna die of leftovers.”

Lydia, holding her doll up in front of her, skipped down past three houses over the brick sidewalk, turned and hopscotched back over an invisible board. She chanted:

Yo mama and my mama was out back, hangin up clothes

My mama socked yo mama in her big old fat nose.

Two weeks later, on a Saturday morning in early July, Carlos woke in his bed at 450 Ridge and raised his hand and traced the cracks in the ceiling with his index finger. It was going to be a long morning because Amy had told him she was sleeping over at her father’s mother’s house and wouldn’t be back until about noon. He had made three good male friends on Ridge, but they sometimes said nasty things about girls, about pussy and stuff, and he was worried that any day now they would say something bad about Amy and then he’d have to fight them, use his fists just the way his father had taught him. But maybe not; after all, the three had sisters and they would have to put their own sisters in that nasty bag they put all the other girls in.

He cocked his finger and shot at the crack that was a robber man. “Badge 714 got you again,” he said. He rolled over and thought of watching television. They had one, but his father didn’t think much of it and had gotten one just to placate his wife and Carlos and Carlos’s older brother. His father had bought the television set on time, though he could have afforded to pay for it outright.

Carlos sat on the side of the bed and picked at the scab on his knee, the result of a fall the day before. He pulled out his quarter from under his mattress and flipped it once, dropping it and watching it roll across the floor and fall next to one of his brother’s socks. The television had a little metal box on the side, and whenever the Newman family wanted to watch it, they would insert a quarter in the box and the television would give them an hour’s worth of viewing. Sometimes the box gave them a few minutes more of viewing, sometimes a few minutes less. Every Saturday afternoon a white man in a noisy little truck came and opened the box and gave the Newmans a receipt for whatever was in the box, as well as a receipt for any extra money they wanted to pay down on the television. “At this rate,” Carol Newman once told her husband, “we’ll be paying on this thing when we’re too old to even see it.” “Thas the whole idea,” Brandon said and kissed his wife full on the lips. “But you’ll still have this.” “I might be too old to enjoy that, too,” Carol said. “Oh no, my lovin never goes outa style.” The worst thing for Carlos was to be watching wrestling on a Saturday night and have the set go dark just when the program got good and there weren’t any quarters to be found in the whole house. Even Brandon Newman hated that.

Carlos got down to crawl to retrieve the quarter. For that moment he forgot the sore and the pain of hitting the floor jolted him. “Damn!” he said. He stopped and waited and listened. His door was closed, but his mother had a thousand ears and most of them were in the walls. For her, cursing was one of the biggest sins because, as she told her sons time and time again, it led to greater sins, like robbery and the end of the family and rape and the suffering of children in Africa and even murder. “Damn” in itself was not a very big word, only four letters, and yet it could lead to the end of the world. Carlos’s brother believed her, but Carlos was a little slow in accepting.