Edward Jones - All Aunt Hagar's Children

“She was struck blind on your rickety-ass bus,” a woman across from Roxanne said. “I hope she sue D.C. Transit for everything yall got.”

“You workin for that blind lady now, bigshot,” the penny man said to the driver, who was making his slow way back to Roxanne. “Try bein nasty to your new boss lady and see how long you keep your job. Fire him right now, lady. He made you blind.”

The driver reached Roxanne. “Lady, why ain’t you tell me you was blind when you got on? I coulda put you by me and it woulda made things easier.”

Roxanne thought she remembered his face, the bill of the hat cocked a bit more up than it should be, and a face too womanish to suit her. “Is your fellow a handsome colored man, Roxanne?” her white woman had once asked. “Thas just it,” Roxanne said to the driver. “I wasn’t blind when I got on.” And the driver was also short. Cedric and Ray and Casey and all the rest had been tall men of long shadows. Her new man, Melvin, was a good foot taller than she was. “Can’t you understand? I was just now struck blind.” But was this driver really short, or had that been the one yesterday? Last week? How can a blind woman trust her memory?

“Right now? Right here? On my bus?”

“Yes. I could see when I paid my fare.” She sighed because at last her words and his words made it all real, for herself, for the entire bus: Roxanne Stapleton was blind. “I could see,” she said, and the words were only a few degrees above a whisper, which was how she liked to speak in public. People said she got loud when she drank, but she didn’t believe them. I ain’t just like every colored person from every corner of the world. “I just can’t see now.” Would the show at Howard Theater ever come back? Was Sam Cooke the kind of man to wait for a blind woman?

“You wanna go to the hospital?” the driver said.

“I don’t know. There’s no pain. I do know I wanna get home now.”

“Where you live?”

“Seventeen-oh-eight 10th Street.”

“I know where that is,” the penny man said. He had followed the driver through the standing crowd. “Round the corner from the fire station on R Street. Right?”

“Yes,” Roxanne said. Please, Lord, give me help from anybody but this jackass.

“You mind takin her home?” the driver said.

The man leaned over and looked out a window, up and down 14th Street. When he rose up again, pennies in his pockets jangled. “This way before my stop,” the man said, “but I could see her home.”

“You want this man to see you home, lady?”

She would have preferred anyone but the absurd man with his pennies, but in the end Roxanne nodded her head. “I’d appreciate it.”

The driver led her to the front and wrote down her name and address and her friend Agnes’s telephone number because Roxanne used her money for clothes rather than a telephone. “I’m sorry bout all this,” the driver said and placed in her hand a slip of paper with the names of the D.C. Transit people she should contact. Then he opened the door and people started saying, “Good luck to you, lady. Good luck to you, blind lady.” The man went down the steps first, his pennies jangling with each movement, and then he reached up and took her hand and guided her down. The door of the bus closed and it went on, and the sound of it leaving was the saddest sound she had heard in a long time.

At the corner of S and 14th Streets she asked the man where they were. She was surprised when he told her because she had thought they were still on the other side of Florida Avenue. She knew the area well, the liquor store at the corner, the office of her notorious landlord, Roscoe L. Jones, behind her at the corner of Swann, and across 14th on S was a little restaurant Melvin had taken her to on their first date. But maybe this wasn’t the place. Maybe this was Southeast and everyone was out to get her.

“If you get a good night’s sleep, your sight might come back,” the man said, placing her right hand around his left upper arm. “Whas your name again, lady?”

She told him.

“I’m Lowell and I’ll see you home safe.” He did not sound like a man so down in the world that he had only pennies for money.

“I really appreciate this, Lowell.” Two weeks ago a woman on New Jersey Avenue returning home from work had been robbed and hit twice in the head with a gun, the worst crime many had heard about in some time. Roxanne was realizing that Washington was getting less and less safe for people like her. The good and the decent. Men with little in their pockets had done the city in. “I’ve told Mr. Shepherd we just cannot chance coming into the city after dark, Roxanne,” her white woman in Silver Spring had said once. “It is not a city for the good and the decent anymore the way it was when Mr. Truman and General Eisenhower were here. There are new elements there.”

Lowell said, “No big deal. I knowed a blind woman when I was a boy in Anacostia. She raised five children by herself after her husband died walkin to work. That lady could fill your cup up to the top and not spill a drop while she was doin it.”

They turned and went up 10th and within a few steps they could smell what was left of the storefront church that had burned down just the Sunday before. “I hope nobody was hurt,” Lowell said, looking through the skeletal thing all the way into the back. It was a frightening mess, and the man was tempted to tell her that she was lucky she could not see it. The church’s reverend was to knock at Roxanne’s door within the week, having heard about what had happened to her. She would talk to him only at the door, would not allow him in, thinking that he was looking for a donation to help rebuild the church. He would see that in her face. “I only came,” Reverend Saunders said, putting a basket of fruit in her hands, “because God would not allow me to do otherwise.”

At her building, a lime-green two-story brick structure, she wanted to know if there was a light on in the basement, and when he said there was, she asked that he go down and knock at the door. Mary Benoit and her two children lived there. Mary wasn’t a drinker, a partyer, but she and Roxanne, ever a woman in search of a good time, were friendly enough. She wanted now to be with people she knew, hear voices she recognized. Mary’s nine-year-old daughter, Adele, came out. “Hi you, Miss Roxanne?”

“I’m blind, honey. It just happened.”

“Blind? Oh, no, Miss Roxanne. You want me to help you?”

“Your mother home yet?” Lowell had placed Roxanne’s hand on the railing before knocking, and now he took that hand and put it in the girl’s hand.

“My mama not home yet,” Adele said, “but Taylor, he home.” The girl began rubbing the hand Lowell had given her, rubbing it in both of hers, the way she had seen people in the movies do with someone’s cold hands.

“I best get on,” Lowell said. “Less you need me for somethin else.”

“Oh, no,” Roxanne said. “You been so good to me. Lemme give you a little somethin for all your trouble. I know you went out your way.” She began to open her pocketbook, but he put his hand over hers. “I don’t need your money, lady. Just try to get better, thas all.” He stepped away.

“Adele, baby, would you see me to my place?” Her room was on the first floor, a few feet beyond the front door, a large room with a sink and an icebox and a stove, along with a bed and dresser and everything else she needed to make a good life. She had been there six years. Adele unlocked the door and Roxanne switched on the light just inside the door and stepped inside. The room smelled the same—Spic and Span mingling with the perfume she had put on that morning before going out to clean her white woman’s house and cook her food. Suddenly, taking small steps into the room, both hands out before her, she could see herself the day she picked up the box of Spic and Span at the Safeway on 7th Street, had taken it from a shelf two up from the bottom and looked at the price to compare it with the larger size one shelf up. No, she had told herself, the small size will do for now; the price had been in blue numbers on a tiny white sticker. She could also see herself the Sunday she got the perfume at Peoples Drug at 7th and M. She had gone in with Melvin; he bought prophylactics in a red box, and she wandered over to the perfume kiosk. “Pick one, and I’ll buy it for you,” he had said and kissed her shoulder from behind. But, no, had that been Melvin, or Cedric of a long time ago, Cedric of two and a half years?