Edward Jones - All Aunt Hagar's Children

Before the cab turned back onto H Street, Noah asked his wife, “What do you think he eats?”

“Little-boy food,” Maggie said, and tapped the knobby knee of a man who could do a hundred deep knee bends.

The city government people made a show of putting their offices all about the city. “We Are Where You Are,” their signs proclaimed. The building in Chinatown at 622 H had only five stories, though a city government woman in another part of the city had told Noah on the telephone that they could find Adam on the eighth floor.

They found Adam on the fifth floor, where a man in front of the building smoking two cigarettes at once had told them “they keep all the boys.” The piece of paper on the door said “824.” The paper was flapping though there was no wind in the hall. The boy, their grandson, was sitting on an orange plastic chair beside a majestic desk, his back to them, his feet unmoving, a foot or so up from the floor. He was six years old, and they had last seen him when he was but seven days old, wrapped in one of the three blankets Maggie had bought for him at Hecht’s. A hatted black policeman looking at a magazine with pictures of naked women sat at the big desk. He was facing them, and when he saw Maggie and Noah, he pointed at them and Adam looked around the side of the chair. The policeman and the boy were alone in the large room filled with nothing but telephones and chairs and huge desks. The policeman had on headphones under his hat and there was a radio playing on his desk. When Noah came closer and the policeman took off his hat and headphones, Noah could hear that the music on the radio was different from the music seeping out of the headphones.

Adam got down from the chair and stood very close to it, his arms at his sides. His hands were empty, wide open, one finger twitching. There was something coming, his body seemed to say, and he had best face it head-on. It was the middle of July, and the city government people had dressed him in corduroy pants and a long-sleeved black shirt, which reminded Noah of gangsters in the movies. He was the son of Maggie and Noah’s only son, and Elsa’s brother, and anyone in the world who knew their son Caleb could see that. Caleb—along with Adam’s mother, Tamara—had disappeared out in that world and no one had seen them for hundreds upon hundreds of days. Maggie went to the boy and knelt, pulled him to her. There was a shopping bag near the boy, and someone had penciled his name on it and that someone had misspelled it. There was nothing else with him, and it was the nothing else that made Maggie pull him closer. At six, Caleb Robinson had had a trunk full of toys, a teacher mother, three sisters who treated him like a prince, a father who commanded a good wage because even blindfolded he could repair any car. Maggie continued to hold the boy and Adam’s arms stayed at his sides.

“You know who I am?” she asked him, pulling back a bit and then kissing him.

“Yes,” he said, but that was not true. A yes was always easier, safer, than a no. The no’s were always trouble for some reason, and the boy was sick and tired of trouble.

“I’m your grandmother, and I’m taking you home for good.”

Adam looked up at Noah, who smiled down and cupped the boy’s chin. “That’s your grandfather. Forever and ever,” Maggie said. Adam said, “Yes.”

The policeman put down his magazine open to the page he was studying and stood up. He reached out his hand to Noah, but Noah ignored him and took up the handles of the shopping bag. When they learned that Adam was not with his mother’s people, they had paid five hundred dollars to a man who, though on the D.C. payroll, spent half his workdays as a private detective. “I’ll find that boy,” he had assured them, but he had never gone looking. Three months ago, the city government people called out of the blue to say they had their grandson, “one Andy Robinson of an unknown age.” But when Maggie and Noah went to the Southeast address to pick him up, the city government people did not have him. They lined up five teenage boys for the couple, but none of the boys would answer to the name Adam, despite all the pleading from the city government woman. “That ain’t me. How many times I gotta tell ya, lady? That just ain’t me,” the smallest of the five kept insisting. Adam had stayed lost until the city government people called again, two days ago, at four on a rainy Sunday morning. “Why you call so early?” Noah asked. “I got nothin better to do, mister.”

They took the stairs, because the elevators refused to go down when there were people in them. Outside, Noah rolled up the boy’s sleeves and pants legs and Maggie held tight to Adam’s hand. He did not turn his head to look left or right but stared only at where he was going. It was a busy street, H, and yet he seemed to have willed himself not to be curious about what was going on.

“You hungry, Adam?” Noah said.

Adam said Yes. The people he had come upon in and out of the city government had taught him that they could not hear him shaking his head. Shaking or nodding the head was as bad as a no to them. And yes was preferred, not yeah. “Good black children never say ‘Yeah.’ You ain’t back down on some slavery plantation, boy.”

“You like Chinese food?” Noah said, looking up and down H at all the restaurants.

“Yes.”

Noah and Maggie looked at each other. “Oh,” Noah said. “You like their corned beef and cabbage, huh?”

“Yes.”

“We’d better find a McDonald’s or something,” Maggie said. “I think he’d drink hemlock if we put it before him.”

They went to the McDonald’s on E Street across from the fortress that was the FBI headquarters. Maggie and Adam sat at a place near the window while Noah got the food. “I got five dollars,” Adam said while they waited. Don’t you know food cost money, boy? Don’t you know that? Black children gotta learn the value of money.

“Oh?” Maggie said. “You’re rich.” He looked puzzled and said, “I got it from a lady who used to be my mother.” Sometimes they liked the truth.

“Tamara? You got it from Tamara?” Wherever his mother was, she was not with Caleb. The grapevine had told Maggie that Tamara and Caleb had come to despise each other toward the end, not long before Elsa was born. Dope fiends, Noah began calling them. But worse than that, he continued, they were bad parents who had flung their flesh and blood to the winds. Root, little pig, or die. “You got the money from Tamara?”

“No,” Adam said softly. “The other lady who was my mother. Miss Joyce. She wasn’t even my mother no more, and she gave me five dollars. I had baths with millions of bubbles. She gave me five dollars when Miss Billie was my mother. Miss Billie hit this man in the head with a fryin pan and made blood pop out his head.” Adam tapped the top of his head several times with his knuckles. “He fell down and went to sleep. She hit him again.” He continued tapping, then rested the hand on the table, the edge of which came midway up his chest. “Miss Joyce had a big house. Bubble time.”

Noah came with the food. He sat across from them, his back to the window. He spread out napkins for a place mat for Adam, unwrapped a hamburger for the boy, and popped a straw through the top of a chocolate-milk-shake container. Adam watched his grandfather’s hands. Noah tore open the cardboard box with the French fries sticking out and squirted little packets of ketchup over them. It was nearing noon and the sun was high and they were shaded where they sat.

Adam put his hands in his lap. There had been one city government mother who made him and the rest of those at her table say a five-minute prayer to Jehovah Our Loving Master before and after meals. “Eat, boy, eat,” Noah said. “There’s plenty more where that come from.” Adam ate. Each time someone came near them he leaned forward, hunched over his food, and when the person had passed he sat up straight again.