Edward Jones - All Aunt Hagar's Children

Tommy’s father Moses came out and collected Amy in his arms. “What yall doin out here for her to get hurt?” “Nothin, Daddy,” Tommy said, one skate in each hand. “It was Mr. Kenyon and Miss Georgia fightin.” Moses Carson took Amy down the street to her house and the children trailed after him. “We didn’t do nothin, Daddy,” Tommy kept saying. Moses was not a father to be shy with the switch or the belt and Tommy needed to get his innocence on the record real quick. “We was just playin, havin fun. Thas all.” Amy woke halfway there, and halfway to her house her mother and one-arm Billie met Moses. “I think she just fainted or somethin, Idabelle,” Moses said. “She gon be all right.” “It was them, Daddy,” Tommy said. “We didn’t do nothin.” Moses said, “Les just get her in the house.” Idabelle went to her house and opened the door and Moses stepped through the door and put Amy down gently on the couch. “You gon be fine,” Moses said. “Daddy, we was just playin and—” “I heard you, Tommy. For goodness sakes!”

The children crowded around the couch. “Yall back off,” Moses said, “and give her a little room.” They stepped back, Carlos drying his tears on the bottom of his polo shirt and Ethel saying it was the bad man that hurt Amy and Idabelle putting a wet cloth to her child’s forehead while asking Ethel what bad man, what bad man would hurt a child? Still holding his skates, Tommy, emboldened by the knowledge that he was free and clear, told Idabelle that nobody really hit Amy but Kenyon did hit Georgia. The adults looked at each other. “Ain’t that right, Carlos?” Tommy asked. Amy moaned on the couch, her eyes closed.

The children in the living room were not among those in the neighbor hood known to be liars—the-wolf-is-comin-so-you-better-get-your-gun type of liars. Twelve-year-old Larry Comstock down the street at 412 Ridge was that kind of liar; people said they couldn’t be that big a liar if their middle names were Liar. He lied like a grown man, people said. He said he saw his grandmother’s best friend burn his grandmother’s hair in a brown-and-white cereal bowl and turn around three times while the hair burned green and then purple and while the friend shouted Jesus get way back and Devil come forward. By the time people realized he was lying about that and most everything else, the two women, who had come up together from South Carolina when neither had child nor chick, had fallen out with one another, and Larry was on his way to reform school for breaking into houses and drinking people’s liquor and falling asleep drunk in their beds with his dirty tennis shoes on.

So when Moses looked at Idabelle and they both looked at the moaning Amy, they were thinking of Larry, and they knew that Tommy and Ethel and Carlos were not in Larry’s league. But still, there was too much strange talk of a child and hitting and a man, and so they called the police. An hour later, the police came, the white one staying outside in the squad car reading the newspaper with a giant magnifying glass while the Negro went into Idabelle’s. The policeman listened to the children, then went down the street to talk with Kenyon while the white man drove the car down the few doors. After the Negro policeman finished, he came back, walked into the wrong house, then found Idabelle’s, and the white policeman reversed the car and came back to where he had been reading the newspaper with the magnifying glass.

Kenyon was innocent of hitting the child, the Negro policeman concluded and left the home and got into the passenger seat and they drove away.

Amy did not go back out to play that day. Despite the truth as determined by Idabelle and Moses and the police, the word went around that day among the children of Ridge Street who had not been witnesses that Kenyon had beaten up not only Georgia but Carlos and Tommy. He had half killed Amy, which was why she wasn’t outside. He had broken Billie’s other arm, which explained his absence, though in fact the boy had only gone to the movies with his father and two sisters and his aunt Lavenia Middleton, who was getting married in September for the first time at forty-nine. She was marrying a Jasper, one of the Northeast Jaspers. People said she was lucky not to get mixed up with one of the Southwest Jaspers.

Amy slept the rest of the day and all night, and in the morning she had her first dream that Georgia was coming to get her, and not her daddy or mama or Grandma Judy with her walking stick or anyone else could protect her. Her mother had to shake the screaming girl awake at about ten on Sunday morning. “Is she here?” Amy kept saying after she woke. “Is Miss Georgia here to get me?” “Nobody’s here but me and Abe,” Idabelle said. Abe Thatcher was the man who loved and wanted to marry Idabelle if she could straighten out where in her life Amy’s father fit. Day by day she was coming to the conclusion that there was no future with her estranged husband Matthew.

Idabelle took Amy in her arms. The fan in the window blew on them and Idabelle wiped the sweat from her daughter’s face and Abe Thatcher stood in the doorway with his hands in his pockets. Amy was the first child he had ever been close to as a man, and he didn’t know what to do. His parents, a Negro and a Jewish woman, had headed a socialist organization in New York City. He had wanted Amy to call him Abe but Idabelle, like most everyone else in D.C. who wasn’t raised a New York socialist, didn’t believe in children calling grown-ups by their first names. Amy usually called him Mr. Abe, though only yesterday she had taken the first step to him and called him “my Able Abe with the missin tooth.” The fan was blowing too loud, and Abe wondered if it was the motor or the blades hitting the protective grill. “Miss Georgia’s comin to get me, Mama,” Amy said after she had calmed. “Georgia likes you, honey pie. She wouldn’t hurt you for anything in the world.” “She did in the dream, Mama. She really did. She had her hand out and she said, ‘Ima get you, Amy. Ima really get you this time.’” “Well, we gon give you a bath and some of Abe’s famous flapjacks and you gon feel right as rain. No more bad dreams after that.” “What about my tattoo?” Amy said. She had a temporary tattoo of a butterfly that Carlos had applied on Saturday; Carlos had bought ten tattoos on a piece of paper for a nickel and Amy had licked a spot on her wrist and he tore off the corner with the butterfly and applied it to the spot. “We’ll wash all around it. You just hold your arm up from the water and it’ll stay on forever.”

The dream came back that afternoon and the girl sat on the couch wrapped in a blanket for the rest of the day. She begged to sleep with her mother, and she managed to get a little sleep that Sunday night with her mother’s arms around her.

Generally, she stayed with Judy during the summer days while her mother worked. That Monday she begged her mother to stay home, but Idabelle said she had to work for them to live right. Amy didn’t cry and let her mother go off without a word. During her lunch break as a keypunch operator at the Federal Housing Administration, Idabelle called around and found Matthew and told him his daughter needed him. “I just saw her on Saturday morning,” Matthew said, “and she was doin fine.” He was confused and was thinking of a Saturday two weeks before. “You fool,” Idabelle said, “that was then. This is Monday and she needs you to go by to see how she’s doin.” “Why don’t you get your Abe to see how she’s doin?” He knew he didn’t love her anymore, but the Devil in the gray suit made him say some awful things.

They were both quiet, for he knew Abe was a good man. Matthew was many things, but he was not a blind fool. “I like him,” Amy had said to her father and his mother. The fault had long been Matthew’s, the drinking, this woman, that woman. Idabelle had been long-suffering; a blues woman could sing a whole album about her, and she and Matthew both knew that. So after the silence, he said he would go by to see Amy. She hung up and stared at the telephone dial. For many years she had remembered his telephone number from when they first met, afraid that to forget meant he would disappear from her life. It was DECatur 7-4 something or other; nowadays, she had to consult her address book for the numbers after the four. Abe had said he was ready to buy her a ring when she was ready. He sometimes used big words when little ones would suffice, but she liked the way she could put the very tip of her tongue through that space in his teeth and make him tingle.