Edward Jones - All Aunt Hagar's Children

Laverne’s grandmother hesitated, stopping a yard or more from the water, and the voice, without rebuke, asked the grandmother, “Did you come all this way to lose your faith, to drop down into the bottom of the sea? Ahead of you is this water and behind you he’s coming? Did you lose your faith?”

“No,” her grandmother said. “No. I stand on my two feet.” Before she set off again, she turned around and from her pocketbook pulled out three ten-dollar bills. She gave one to each of her grandchildren, which was unusual for a woman who had never given them more than fifty cents at any one time, lest they be corrupted. Laverne’s youngest brother, a boy of easy giggles, looked suspiciously at the ten-dollar bill; he was still at an age where he did not trust paper money. It could tear; it could burn; it could fly away with the wind. But he folded the bill as small as he could and tucked it into the pocket of his swimming trunks. Laverne’s grandmother set off again and the youngest brother said, “Granny, you gon ruin your pretty shoes in all that water.”

Their grandmother looked down, somewhat worried, as if deciding between her $12.95 Hahn’s shoes and the command of the voice of the universe. “We have waited since the first day,” the voice said with the greatest patience. “Have you not waited since the first day?” the voice said with the greatest patience. “Have you not waited with us?” Their grandmother turned and looked at the boy, dark-skinned, bony, painfully perfect. He waved though they were but a few yards apart. After several moments, she took a step and was standing where water met dry sand. She stopped, her brown patent leather pocketbook hanging from her left arm. Then, in a few more steps, she was standing a foot above the bottom of the sea. She continued walking, one uncertain step after another. All the Negroes along the beach were quiet, so that the loudest sound when the voice was silent was the ocean hitting the beach and then retreating.

By now, Laverne’s mother and father were back, followed by a lifeguard who was looking about as if there was something that would make more sense than an old woman walking on water. Laverne’s father watched until his mother was about five yards out on the water, and then he said, “Mama.”

Haltingly, Laverne’s grandmother turned around for the first and only time. “Ain’t I always told you it might come to this?” she told her son. “I’ve done nothin that I couldn’t clean up by the next day. And it was hard, but now I wanna go and complain to somebody about it. Then shut up for good.” Then she said to Laverne’s mother, “Cheryl, you try to splain it to him. Just to let him know. I got somethin I have to do right now.” Laverne’s father moved toward the ocean. He was crying but did not speak. He was joined by his wife and she was followed by the lifeguard. The children had not moved since their grandmother handed them the money.

The grandmother set off again. With each step, all the Negroes on the beach could see that she was gaining confidence. Still, the lifeguard, when the grandmother was more than twenty yards out into the sea, shouted to her with complete sincerity, “Ma’am, you all right out there? You need some help?” He was eighteen.

Not stopping, the grandmother raised her right arm and wiggled her fingers that she was fine. For all the purpose and certainty of her step, she could have been walking down 7th Street on her way to St. Aloysius Catholic Church. There was nothing on the ocean and the horizon except the old woman, not a boat, not a buoy, and even the seagulls had disappeared from the air. When the grandmother was but a foot tall on the sea, her son sat down on the beach and refused to look anymore. When the grandmother was an inch or so, Laverne walked to the ocean’s edge and raised a hand to shade her eyes, and her youngest brother came up beside her and put his hand in hers. The other brother took a place beside his father. Then, in the time it took to sigh, the grandmother was gone completely.

There was no more of that day for anyone, even though the sun was way up in the sky, and little by little the Negroes collected what they had brought to the beach and went back to their cars and buses. Now and again a stranger would come up to Laverne or a member of her family. The strangers did not speak but simply touched a shoulder or hand in sympathy, in understanding. Laverne felt no sadness and she slowly began to fear that she had not loved her grandmother as much as the old woman had always said she loved her. The family’s eyes stayed focused on the horizon where the grandmother had disappeared, and Laverne and her family remained on the beach until well after the sun was down, accompanied only by the lifeguard, who had caught a chill but who felt it was his duty to stay with them.

She opened her eyes and looked about at the world of Anacostia. A woman and man holding hands walked by her. “I told you not to buy that kind,” the woman said to the man. “I told you you’d be sorry.” “I don’t know what I was thinkin,” the man said. “I musta been crazy.” Laverne had been born and raised in Anacostia. After Anacostia High, after her first job at Woodward & Lothrop, she had wanted to move across the river where she believed the real Washington had been waiting all those years for her to grow up and come over and be a woman people could not stop talking about. They would say wonderful things about her, about how a party wasn’t a party until she arrived. They would say she was loyal to her friends. That was about the extent of all the wonderful things she imagined people saying about her, something one man pointed out to her. She fell in love with him. He said he had gone to high school with her but she did not remember him. That man, Mason, did not want to move across the river, and six years ago when they married she said that was fine. Washington across the river had not stopped telling her that she was missing so much by living in that Anacostia place where people had molasses in their blood. People were still waiting to say glorious things about her, the city said.

She took out the shopping list. Some cookies for her son, shaving cream for her husband, just enough to carry up the hill and not tire herself. Some time away from them on a busy Saturday. A car’s horn tooted, and a woman shouted out the window, “Vernie, Vernie. See you tonight.” The car was gone before she could say Yes, yes, they would see her. Her family would be waiting at Sears, Roebuck and Co. on Alabama Avenue—still another pair of pants for the boy, a tie for her husband and his assistant manager job at Murphy’s Five and Dime Store. She looked down at her body. In a few months she would start to show. Should she buy new maternity clothes or settle for what was left over from her first pregnancy? “Styles don’t matter when you’re pregnant,” her mother had once said. The dancing would have to stop for a while. That would be difficult. The best time she ever had at a party she had when she was three months pregnant with her son. An all-night thing where she had sweated through her clothes and every man she danced with told her the sweat just added to the beat. “Gimme, gimme,” said one man, who was drunk but didn’t show it, and she had shaken her head and watched him close his eyes and open his mouth to receive a few drops of sweat. “Mother’s milk,” the man said. Her husband had slow danced with her but mostly he stood on the party-giver’s balcony looking down toward the Monument and talking to a woman whose mouth was wired shut because of an accident. Laverne had thought her son would inherit her love of dancing from her, but he was as clumsy as her husband. Her husband had been born with three webbed toes on his left foot. The boy was free of that.