Edward Jones - All Aunt Hagar's Children

Amy Witherspoon did not fare well for much of the rest of the summer. When not plagued with the dreams about Georgia, the child suffered a lethargy that caused her to sleep most of the time on her mother’s couch during the evenings and weekends or on Judy’s couch during the days while her mother worked. Amy, “poor Idabelle’s miracle after goin through so many miscarriages,” was well liked in the neighborhood, and everyone prayed that she would get better, but in their beds at night, after the lights had been turned out, adults feared that the girl was not long for this world. The doctors, none of whom were native Washingtonians, knew nothing, blaming everything on the D.C. heat. “Keep her cool,” they said. Children continued to play on Ridge Street that summer, but they tried to be quiet when near Idabelle’s or Judy’s. “Shhh, stop bein so loud,” they told each other. That was also the way they were when near a house where there had been a recent death. “Shhh, Miss Rita just died in there. Les go someplace else.”

Carlos and Ethel came each day to see her and Amy would rouse herself to play on the living room floor at her mother’s or Judy’s. Carlos, to be sure, was particularly affected by not having her play with him outside. He bought her Sno-Ball cupcakes and Nehi sodas and Kits by the handful, but the girl of early summer was not there. While she slept, he came to enjoy talking to Miss Judy, usually over sodas in her kitchen. She had pictures of a colored Jesus in every room in her house and Carlos asked her, during their first full conversation, if she had had some little boy put a brown face on Jesus with a crayon, for he had known only a white Jesus.

By mid-August, he felt comfortable enough with Judy to tell her that people said Amy was going to die and he had to beat one boy up for saying it. “I didn’t wanna hurt him, Miss Judy, but I had to.” It was a Friday. He, like Amy and several other children, usually stayed with Judy while their parents worked. “Thas two fights I been in this year,” Carlos said. He showed her the sore on his knuckle and she put Mercurochrome on it and told him he should watch himself because he might get into a fix he couldn’t get out of.

Then he told her that if Amy hadn’t seen Kenyon do what he did to Georgia, everything would have been all right. “She saw him beat Georgia?” Judy said. They were talking in early August.

“Saw him knock her down the steps,” Carlos said. “I did, too. We all did. He kinda went like this—POW!—and down she went. POW!”

“Oh, mercy!” Judy peered around the corner of the kitchen to make sure Amy was still sleeping on the couch. She knew the girl often dreamed of Georgia, but she hadn’t known that she had seen the violence, and as she listened to Carlos, she wondered why Amy didn’t dream of Kenyon.

“Miss Judy, she was bleedin, too.”

“Who?” People had rarely come to visit her and her first husband in those woods in Arkansas. Not being a very strong woman, she had had to dig the grave over three days after she had killed him. And, too, one of her shoulders had been dislocated two weeks before by her husband; the broken finger from two months or so before had already healed. It would have been easy to leave him lying with his head split open on the kitchen floor, but their house had always been a neat one, and she thought all Aunt Hagar’s children deserved a place in the ground. Dragging him out the back door, down the steps, through the garden bursting with beans and tomatoes and okra, along the path beside the new privy, past the old privy and then to a spot where the ground whispered that it would be amenable to receiving him—that dragging was almost as hard as the digging. “Who?” Judy said.

“Miss Georgia. She was bleedin right here.”

There was a knock at the door and Tommy came in wearing a baseball glove and holding a tennis ball in his other hand.

“Didn’t she, Tommy?” Carlos said.

“Didn’t she what?” Tommy said, putting his glove on the table after tucking the tennis ball in the glove.

“Didn’t Miss Georgia start bleedin after she got knocked down them stairs and everything?”

“Yes, ma’am,” Tommy said. “She sure did. They be fightin upstairs all the time.” He dashed around the table and started to playfully choke Carlos’s neck. “Like this,” and he gave Carlos a play-punch when he wasn’t choking him. Tommy said, “Ima kill you, you no-good somebody. Take this! BAM!” Carlos flailed his arms and pretended to be the battered Georgia in her apartment. He moaned, “Don’t you be killin me, Mr. Kenyon.” “She don’t say ‘Mr. Kenyon,’” Tommy said. “That ain’t what she say.” “Okay. Don’t you be killin me, Kenyon.” “Yeah,” Tommy said. “Thas it,” and he pounded a laughing Carlos on the top of the head, saying, “You ain’t no good! I don’t know why I waste my p-precious time with somethin like you!”

“All right, yall,” Judy said. “You gon wake Amy.” The boys continued on, silently fighting and reacting, silently mouthing words.

“My mama told my daddy to go up there and make him stop,” Tommy said.

“Oh, you storyin me,” Carlos said.

“Uh-huh,” Tommy said. “She really did. She said…she said like this, ‘Moses, why you don’t go up there and make that man stop hurtin her?’ And my daddy said, my daddy he said, ‘As long as he ain’t hittin you, why you worried, Lois?’ Thas my mama name,” Tommy informed Carlos, though Carlos knew that already. “And my mama said like this, ‘That ain’t the point, Moses.’ ‘Well, what is the point, Lois? For goodness sakes!’ And my mama said, ‘What happens if he kills her, Moses? What happens if he kills that poor woman just above your own children’s head? What happens then, huh, Moses?’ ‘She’ll be dead and you and the kids won’t be dead. Why you want me to get mixed up in another man’s business? Why you wanna put me in the middle of that mess?’ And my mama said, ‘I don’t know what I’m gonna do with you, Moses Carson.’ My daddy just got up from the table.”

“What he do then?” Carlos said. Judy was at the stove, tending to a pot of neck bones. Vinnie, even with his appetite like a bird’s, liked all parts of the pig, from the ears to the tail, and she cooked it all for him. Her doctor had told her to stay away from pork because it raised her blood pressure. Vinnie enjoyed neck bones with Great Northern beans, but three stores had been out of them, so now the bones were simmering with Navy beans. The corn bread could be cooked at the last moment.

“He went into the living room and turned on the radio.”

“Oh,” Carlos said. He liked a good story and hated that this one ended with a man in a living room listening to the radio. “Thas all?”

“Thas all I heard, cause then I went outside to play. You member? I came to see you and you was eatin your dinner. Carlos, you member when we saw her shame?”

“What?” Judy said.

The boys eyed each other. Tommy realized he had said too much, but he wanted to say more to hold Carlos’s attention.

“What you say?” Judy said.

“We saw her shame, Grandma,” Carlos said. He had followed the other children into calling her “Grandma.” He was rolling the tennis ball around the table and swinging his feet in the brand-new Keds just an inch above the rung of the chair and waiting for Judy to take the ball off the table because he didn’t know where it had been.

“Yep,” Tommy said. “She was showin her underwear.”

Judy tasted from the pot of neck bones. She had seen Georgia the other day, limping. “Just woke up with a touch of rheumatism,” Georgia said. How, Judy asked herself as they talked, had it all dissolved into plain open lies? How could it be that two women, one old enough to be mother to the other, could talk on such a nice summer day, and one lie with not a lot of blinking or looking away to hide the lie? And how could one accept the lie and carry it away like somebody’s everyday truth? “I had the same thing,” Judy told Georgia. “And what you do?” “I took a aspirin with a Stanback,” Georgia said. “You mix them two?” “Yeah, it don’t hurt me atall,” Georgia said. “I think them two would give me a stomachache,” Judy said.