Edward Jones - All Aunt Hagar's Children

Carlos and Amy and Billie and Tommy and Ethel and a few others were playing on Ridge near 4th that Saturday in November when Kenyon came up 4th and turned onto Ridge. He was in a suit few chauffeurs could afford, and he had not been drinking. Amy saw him first. The street was busy that day, women sweeping the sidewalk and cleaning their windows and men gossiping and washing their cars and just generally showing off. Amy stood up from her jacks game and watched him walking down the middle of the street, avoiding either sidewalk. Almost as soon as the other children saw what she was looking at, the girl fainted and Carlos and Billie, who was now free of his cast, caught her and lowered her bit by bit to the ground. Carlos was not afraid this time, because he knew fainting was a long way from dying. Ethel called Amy by name and sat down beside her, dropping the jacks ball, which rolled away into the gutter. Tommy ran to get Idabelle.

Carlos watched Kenyon come toward them, and then, not knowing what else to do, he came out to the street and got up onto William McGavin’s new Chevrolet and put his hands to his mouth, megaphone-style. “Boo boo boo!” he shouted. He felt better with each second. Seeing him up there, the other children took up the cry, some of them not having even seen Kenyon and thinking it was all just another of Carlos’s games, and some of them actually seeing Kenyon and just not liking the man who beat up Miss Georgia and then got beat up by Tommy’s father.

“Boo boo boo!” the children shouted.

Kenyon came nearer to Carlos, came within a foot of him and raised his hand as if to swat him. Carlos fell back but went on shouting. “Boo boo boo!” Idabelle came running, followed by Matthew and Abe, and they found Amy waking up. Kenyon continued on down the middle of the street, and more children were shouting. Carlos saw Judy five or six doors down come out of her house and he called to her. She and other adults began to fill the street and Kenyon found himself having to maneuver through a growing crowd. Carlos and Judy looked at each other until she turned her head to see Georgia, four doors down and across Ridge, open her door and step out on the stoop to find out what all the commotion was about. The two women stared at each other and Judy began her own booing, a weak, self-conscious cry.

William McGavin came out of his house and saw Carlos on his new car. “Boy, your daddy ain’t got anough to fix anything you might break! Get on down from there,” and he raised his arms and Carlos sailed into them and took off up the street behind Kenyon and the crowd. “Boo boo boo!” He pushed his way through to get closer to Kenyon, who was slowing. Then about midway up the block, Kenyon could see Georgia, who had not gone beyond her stoop. She saw him but did not come down the stairs to the sidewalk. Some children near her were crying “Boo!” at whoever was near, and some of them directed “Boo!”s at her. Anyone who knew her could see the difference in her face, the way the nose was off to the side from where it had been all her life, the little bump at the edge of her lip, engorged with blood months ago and now full of something part blood, part pus, and part bile that had traveled to the lip from some distant place in her body. Kenyon looked at Georgia and Georgia looked at Kenyon. He noticed that she had cut her hair. She knew full well that he hated short hair.

The crowd became too thick for Kenyon to move, and he turned around to see Matthew carrying Amy back to the house. Abe was a step behind him, but Idabelle was standing on the sidewalk watching Kenyon, who started back toward 4th Street. The crowd made way. He got to 4th Street and turned the corner and the children and the grown-ups stopped following him but continued to shout “Boo”s and each one rained down upon him.

Once fully on 4th heading toward M, he was free of them. He stopped mid-block and remembered that he had been two months sober. He felt weak, and at 4th and M he went into Leon’s to buy two bottles of Rock Creek cream soda. He opened both bottles on the opener attached to the cooler and kept one bottle in the bag and drank the other as he came out of the store. He looked down M Street to where New York Avenue ran right into New Jersey Avenue. On that corner where he stood, wobbly, 4th took a dip and continued to dip all the way to K Street. Farther up M was 5th Street and What Ailing Ya. He went down 4th, drinking the soda. He remembered that there was a store at 4th and L. The two sodas he had would last him until he could reach that store and fortify himself with two more. The problem would be if that store didn’t have cream soda. What would he do after that? What would he do?

The people on Ridge Street became afraid that Kenyon would come back and hurt Georgia, so they started looking out for her, driving her to and from work. Throughout the rest of 1955, the big liar Larry Comstock’s twenty-three-year-old cousin, only one year out of Tennessee, got the job of taking her to work. He was Randy Comstock, and he had become engaged to a young woman whose family had lost their home in Georgetown when the city and federal government people forced all the colored people out of there and brought in the white people. Randy liked to talk and Georgia enjoyed listening to him.

One day near the end of December, he started in talking about the life he and his fiancée were planning in a house on South Dakota Avenue in upper Northeast. “It’s a nice house, Miss Georgia…Real nice. You should see it sometime. I figure we can be happy there with one, maybe two kids, then after that, if we have any more, we can move up to somethin bigger. We got plans, Miss Georgia, we got real good plans, and I figure the sky’s the limit.” He was a cautious driver, both hands on the wheel where they should be, as Judy knew before she picked him to drive Georgia. “Now Irma, she want three kids, Miss Georgia. I say four. I want four cause thas a nice number. My mama and pappy had four children, and each of their mamas and pappies had four children, so I figure thas good anough for me. But Irma…Well, I don’t know…I will have to defer to Irma on that score. A real man has to defer to his wife on such matters, thas what my pappy told me. But I think I can live with three kids. You think I can live with three kids, huh, Miss Georgia? You think three kids will suit me?”

Georgia was one and a half years from marrying Alvin Deloach. She was more than eight years from marrying Vaughn Anderson, who would worship the ground she walked on, but that was not the kind of love she was used to. “I think three children will do me quite well, Miss Georgia.” She was nearly twenty years from going to Israel with Cornelia and Lydia, who would not be a doctor but who would make more money than all her ancestors put together, all of them, all the way back to Eve. “A real man can defer to his wife and still be a real man, is what I say, Miss Georgia.” She was just about thirty years from seeing her first grandchild come into the world. “A little give and a little take make a good marriage, my mama always said.” She was more than forty and a half years from death.

Tuesday

After the cab turned off East Capitol onto 8th Street, Noah Robinson saw further evidence that trees were disappearing from Washington. Where were all the oaks and maples and birches, even the odd pear, apple, or peach tree, that had been there in the time when he did not yet know himself and the city seemed always as green as his grandparents’ idea of Heaven? Even when he had become responsible for a wife and children, the trees had still been there, reminding him year after hard year how far he had to go and how far he had come. Now the landscape of the city, high and low, seemed barren, no grand trees for children playing hide-and-go-seek, no spreading refuge for old people out in the fire of summer. Why had he not noticed the death of the trees before, at age forty, at fifty-five, at sixty? When he was seven, and his family first arrived in Washington, he’d had a teacher at Stevens Elementary School who taught her students about the trees of the city. Mrs. Waters hung her eyeglasses on a pink string around her neck and told them how lucky they were to have trees in Washington. The boy loved the teacher and he loved learning about trees, and he loved the way the trees told him through the teacher’s words that he, pining for South Carolina, might yet be happy in this new world.