Edward Jones - All Aunt Hagar's Children

She stood up from the bench, more annoyed than anything else that the Devil stood between her and a fairly perfect day of shopping and partying. The mind had to be uncluttered to enjoy a party. Why had he waited until she was twenty-five to come to see her? The paternal grandmother who had walked into the Atlantic Ocean had first met the Devil when she was five years old; a schoolbook under her arm, she had turned onto a red country road in Georgia and there he was, ugly as homemade soap with next to no teeth, just done with doing it to her grandmother’s cousin and both of them covered with the dust of the road. “I just got tired of his beggin all the time,” the cousin would say later. And he had come to her maternal grandmother when she was thirteen, wrapped in a long yellow shawl that dragged along in the upstate New York snow. As far as Laverne knew, he had never come to her mother, but she could not be certain because the Devil was not something her mother talked about to any of the women in her family. He was forever on the women’s minds, but Laverne had tried to live in a different world. Now, riding her annoyance, she wished she had picked up a trick or two for dispelling him, for getting on with the rest of her life.

Back in the Safeway, he was standing just as she had left him and he waved her over as soon as she was in the store. “Himself been waitin,” he said. “Himself swim all the way over that Anacostia River.”

“I know. You told me once. I’m not deaf.” Laverne got the cart. The grandmother and the girl from the beauty parlor came behind her and the woman told the girl to get a cart. “Make sure it’s a good one,” the woman said. “You didn’t get a good one the last time.” They moved off to the right.

“No, no. Himself would never cuse you of that. To be deaf, to be blind,” he said, setting his hat back on his head, “would not be how himself wants things for you.” She noticed that one of his incisors was the brightest gold. As a girl, she had believed that men with gold teeth had gotten them by drinking too much beer. No one in her neighborhood had nice things to say about such men.

“I don’t want none a what you sellin today,” she said.

“Himself ain’t sellin,” he said, stepping to the front of the cart to get her attention. “Himself ain’t buyin or sellin right now. Thas all a long way from himself’s mind. You can believe that.”

He did have a pleasantness about him. She took the cart to the left, toward the fruits and vegetables, and the Devil followed, in step beside her. The colorful array of the produce seemed especially dazzling today. When he was younger, she liked to have her son name the colors as the two of them shopped; he was more inclined to eat squash after he had stood in the Safeway aisle and held it by the green stem and called it a yellow fellow over and over again. She could see her son now, standing with the towel about him, just after his bath, soft and brown and waiting for his kisses. She turned to look over her shoulder, as if the boy, holding his father’s hand, might be just outside the window. She looked into the Devil’s face and he said, “When bout is your baby due?” His fragrance swirled about her and she thought that maybe he wasn’t who her mind told her he was, but was only some man with tiny feet out to romance her.

“What?” she said. Some men liked pregnant women, could sense their condition even when, like her, they were not showing.

“When your baby due?”

“What’s it to you? It ain’t your baby.”

“Just passin the time with a beautiful woman, is all. Can’t himself do that?”

“Himself can do whatever he pleases.” She reached the end of the aisle and turned the cart to the right, stopping at the head of the aisle with sodas. Was there some small store between here and where her husband and son were waiting? Nothing really had to begin and end with the Safeway. Could she leave and end this? But she said, “In seven months. My baby’s due in about seven months.”

“See? That whatn’t so hard,” the Devil said. “That mean a October baby. Nothin pleases himself more than October babies. They so…” and he stopped, and because she wanted to know what he had to say, she stopped after a couple of feet as well. “They so accommodatin, them October babies. Himself ain’t never met a October baby yet that didn’t like him. October is one big accommodatin month, all thirty-one days.”

“My baby won’t be accommodating to anything,” Laverne said, moving on.

“He has to be, Miss Laverne. If he born in October, he has to be accommodatin to himself.”

“I don’t care what you say.” She knew there was something in that aisle she needed but couldn’t remember what it was. She stood before two shelves of canned and bottled Pepsi-Cola. Why wasn’t the Dial soap here like it was supposed to be, so she could use it to dial her mother and ask if her husband and son liked pinto beans? Who would know better than her own mother about Safeway specials? “You say that like bein born in October is some kinda bad thing.”

“Himself didn’t say that. Himself didn’t say anything bad about October.”

“My child will have October to be happy and not be accommodating to you or anyone else.” She picked up a large bottle of soda. The price said thirty-five cents. Should I buy it? What was it last week?

“Himself knows that. Please. Please, Miss Laverne. Himself wants all October babies to be happy. Himself told you—Octobers like himself. They don’t cuss himself; they don’t tell himself to get thee back, get way back in the line like some do. Like them April babies.”

“Why are you doin this to me?”

“Aprils are so disrespectful. April got thirty days too many. April would be a perfect month if it had only one day. And October should have thirty-one more days. Give October all April’s days and see what a good world we would have then, Miss Laverne.” Laverne put the soda back. “Why, ain’t it that your grandmother was born in October?”

She looked at him. He was talking about her mother’s mother, the one in her giant house on the Gold Coast on Crittenden Street, a place she hated for people to call a mansion. Her grandmother had torn down the two large houses originally on two plots of land and built herself the biggest in that area, to the ire of the wealthy blacks around her who usually had nothing bad to say about the ostentatious. She had four fireplaces in that house and they all burned every day of the year.

“All himself is sayin is that October has good things to recommend it. And soon it’ll have Laverne’s new baby to recommend. Thas all himself is sayin.” He touched his hand to his heart. “Please, Miss Laverne, les not dirty the sweet month of October here in the Safeway. Please, Miss Laverne.”

“My grandmother has nothin to do with any of this.” She went on and turned onto an aisle with canned goods. “I’m not my grandmother.”

“If Miss Laverne says so, then himself says so, too.” He came up close beside her again. “Which one, Miss Laverne?”

She ignored him. She remembered the eight cans of pinto beans for one dollar. Could she carry all eight cans up the hill? It would be just like her husband to get tired of them after only the second can. Heading out with her son one trash day morning, she had seen the trash can of the man downstairs on the sidewalk, the top leaning against the side of the can. On top of the pile was an empty tray that had held some red meat, perhaps hamburger. Was he a good cook? she had wondered. What did he specialize in? Did he do lasagna? There was an empty package of Oreos, a few black crumbs huddled in one corner. The top of a liquor bottle was poking up as well, and had she not been trying to get her son to school, she would have picked it up to see what brand he drank.