Edward Jones - All Aunt Hagar's Children

“I ain’t finished talkin,” Kenyon said and grabbed Moses’s shoulder, turning him half around before punching him in the face. Lois screamed and her baby began crying to see her mother’s distress. Moses blocked the second punch and hit Kenyon as hard as he could in the stomach, then managed a quick one to the jaw, and Kenyon fell back on the stairs. Georgia screamed, “Honey, be careful!” Lois handed the baby to Tommy and came out. Moses reached in to Kenyon’s place and was set to give him a solid one to his nose, but Kenyon raised his arms to cover his face and his whole body shook. Kenyon said nothing, just crossed his arms at the wrists. He was a pretty man, Moses could see now that they were so close, and his face was everything. It was the pretty men, Moses thought, who made it such a bad world. The pretty men and their puppy-hearted women. Georgia screamed that he should let her man be. Kenyon kept his hands up before his face and Lois told her husband to step away. “Back off, Moses, I’m tellin you! Just back off!”

All through the Labor Day weekend, the children on Ridge Street talked about the fight that none of them had actually witnessed and only Tommy and his brother had heard. Tommy’s father had won hands down, they all decided. The children of ten years and under reenacted the fight with wrestling, and no one wanted to be Kenyon because he was destined to lose. If a boy playing Kenyon happened to wrestle a victory, he was accused of not playing fair, because the rules of a reenactment dictated that Kenyon be the loser. “I don’t wanna play with you no more,” the losing Moses would say. “You ain’t doin it right.” “I gotta win sometime,” the winning Kenyon would say. “You get to win all the time. I don’t like that.” “Tough titty.”

Amy had been fine for more than two weeks, but the night before school started she dreamed again that Georgia was coming to get her. This time her father came up beside Georgia and together they took off after the girl. Abe heard her in the night and went and put her in the bed beside Idabelle and then went downstairs to sleep on the couch. Idabelle thought her daughter would not be able to go to school, but the next day Amy said she wanted to go.

She entered the third grade, and Carlos was disappointed that she was not in his class at Walker-Jones. It had been one of his greatest hopes during the summer. Please, please, he had prayed to God, put us in the same room. Pretty pretty please. He always thought of himself as a good boy, despite what his mother and father sometimes said. If he had something to trade to God, he thought his prayers would have been answered. He was a curser and he promised God not to do it anymore, but God was not impressed.

The first Saturday after school started, he had just split an orange Popsicle with Tommy on Carlos’s side of the street when they saw Kenyon chase Georgia out of their place and down Ridge Street toward 4th Street. Ethel saw them, and so did Amy and Billie and Larry Comstock’s younger brother. The men working in the garage across from Georgia came out and watched. Amy backed away toward her door. Kenyon caught Georgia two doors from Amy, just about when Judy came across the street with her walking stick. Kenyon slapped Georgia twice before Judy knocked him once in the head with the stick. Georgia crawled away toward Amy and Amy opened her door and Georgia crawled inside. Idabelle came out and stood with Judy, and Moses, Tommy’s father, came out, with Lois following with their baby, and he stood on the other side of Kenyon as the man raised his hands in a I-don’t-want-no-trouble-with-yall fashion. Kenyon went back to his place. Georgia went back three hours later, and they were quiet for the rest of the weekend and for a few weeks after. They walked about arm in arm, as they had in the first days of their relationship. They had long ago become known as common-law wife Georgia and her common-law husband Kenyon, though a few people held back and said two years, not several months, was the mark of such a marriage.

They went out to the What Ailing Ya one evening in October, not long before the schoolchildren got Columbus Day off, and got to fighting outside the beer garden after Kenyon claimed he saw her winking at a man nicknamed Frisky Fred. This man went to Baltimore, sometimes even to Philadelphia, to have his hair processed so he could come back and tell people in D.C. that the process was his own natural good hair. The police were called on Kenyon and Georgia. It was the first time ever that anyone had called the law on them, and it would be the last. They took Georgia just a block up 5th Street to the Women’s Bureau, and Kenyon just down 5th to the Number 2 Precinct. She got sick during the night, and though she called for one, said her head was killing her, no one brought her a Stanback. About six in the morning the woman with whom she was sharing the cell, a nightclub singer who had forged three Post Office money orders, got tired of Georgia calling for “my Kenyon” and made up a song on the spot that all the other women in their cells took up and sang until it was time for breakfast. When one part of the cell block would flag with the song, another would take it up and the song would continue again for some time.

Oh my Kenyon, where is my boy?

Oh my Kenyon, you done took my joy.

Oh, Kenny, my pretty face is all yours

Play with that face, Kenny, like you do all your toys.

By seven, before the sun came up, Georgia was cursing them all, and then, not long before eight, she was crying and asking of no one in particular why they wanted to hurt her damn feelings when they didn’t even know her, didn’t even know what her life was like.

She got back home about three in the afternoon, walked right across 5th and into Ridge Street. From the jail, she had managed to get ahold of Cornelia’s neighbor just before noon, and the neighbor told Cornelia, who didn’t have a telephone. Cornelia had come over and bailed her out. “This the first time I ever been in that place,” Georgia said of the Women’s Bureau. “The first time for me, too,” said Cornelia, who had left Lydia with the neighbor because she didn’t want her child getting too familiar with the law.

Kenyon did not come back. That morning he had returned from jail and gotten most of his clothes and disappeared. Georgia wondered why he left, and put the word out everywhere that she was looking for him, that they should talk things over. School and all else went on for the children, and Carlos’s love for Amy did not falter. Her bad dreams were still there, but she was learning that when Georgia and her father came for her in them, she could hide behind a talking tree that lied and told them Amy had gone way over there. The big subject among the children as October came to an end was of the men who played the Lone Ranger and Tonto on the television coming to D.C. four days before Halloween. Their horses Silver and Scout would even be there, or so the rumor went. But when adults saw the children of Ridge Street getting excited about going to see them, they let them know that the theater where the Lone Ranger and Tonto would be appearing would not let colored children in. “What a gyp!” the kids responded. “Dag!”

Somehow the song composed that night by the nightclub singer made its way out of the Women’s Bureau, across 5th and all along Ridge Street. Girls jumped rope to it. Georgia heard them, could not help but hear them as she went on with life in her apartment and the girls played outside her window, not really knowing what they were saying but happy with something that they could jump rope to. The song was fine for jumping single rope but with double Dutch the rhythm suffered except with the most expert of girls. Day by painful day Georgia would take something of his that was in her way and put it aside in a closet in the second bedroom.