Edward Jones - All Aunt Hagar's Children

The snow came up again and he turned onto the main road that would lead all the way down through Arlington to the bridge. Ruth’s husband patted the horse’s neck to reassure her that she was capable of the snow journey, that the snow would not amount to much. The horse’s mane was in a tangle, and as he made his way through the new snow, he busied himself with trying to untangle it. But it was a hopeless task, and he patted the neck again, told the horse he would do a proper job with a soft brush before he returned her to her owner. The dank smell of the horse rose up and held fast like a stalled cloud before his face. Ruth’s husband smiled and told the horse he forgave her.

In less than a mile, the snow came up fierce and he considered stopping for the night at the Landrys. But within sight of their place, the snow returned to a gentle falling, and he passed the Landrys and their hearth and its promise and continued on. He and the horse were alone on the road, and it occurred to him that all the world might know something about the weather to come that he should know, something that maybe he, no more a country boy, had learned and forgotten. In another mile, the snow took a turn toward bad again. Ruth’s husband stopped and tied his scarf around his head and pulled the hat tight on top of that. They went on. They came through a small forest virtually empty of snow and he pulled the coat tighter, and as they emerged from the forest, Washington appeared before him, a long grayness shimmering between the snowflakes across the Aqueduct Bridge, across the quiet Potomac.

He halted at the mouth of the bridge, the land of Washington, D.C., spread out forever and ever before him. He ran his hand over his meager mustache and the beginnings of a beard. He wiped the snow from them and thought what a wasted effort it was since there was more snow to come. The horse raised her head high, then a bit higher, perhaps knowing something the man did not. Ruth’s husband could hear voices now, and he shuddered. He turned in the saddle to see the southern road so many would travel on to reach that land just across the river. He saw nothing but the horse tracks in the snow, growing fainter with each second as more and more snow covered them. The voices hushed. His boots touched the horse’s sides ever so gently. The horse stepped onto the bridge to Washington, her white breath shooting forward to become one with the white of the snow. Ruth’s husband patted her neck. The top button on his coat came loose again and he rebuttoned it, thankful that his hand had not yet stiffened up. His heart was pained, and it was pain enough to overwhelm a city of men.

In the days before I first started kindergarten, the men in my life came from here and there to bring me things and more things, as if, my mother was to say, I was going away and never coming back. In mid-August, my mother’s baby brother came down from his life in Philadelphia and went with the girlfriend of the moment, the one who would break his heart, to buy “some quality” at Garfinckel’s, a department store that had Negroes arrested if they tried to shop there. While the girlfriend could have passed for white among white people, black people knew their own kind. My uncle, in the darkest of his summer suits, walked two or so paces behind her up and down Garfinckel’s aisles, carrying two small boxes, wrapped and empty, a made-up chauffeur’s cap setting ever so straight on his chemist’s head. They were enveloped in youth and lived for games like that. My uncle giggled at one point, excited by it all, and his girlfriend, to halt her own giggling, turned and asked in a voice cultivated at Spelman College, “Is there something you want to share with us all, Rufus?” And she waved her arm as dramatically as she could, and all the white people near them turned to see one of their own take charge. My grandparents did not name him Rufus. My uncle bought me nine exquisite dresses and had me model each one for him and his girlfriend before they returned to Philadelphia.

The days took me closer to my first day of school, and the men in my life continued to come to me. My uncle Cyphax, who couldn’t seem to stay out of jail, came in the night when we were all asleep and left three pairs of shoes at our front door, and tucked in the box of each pair was a receipt from Hahn’s. “I have to fly,” he wrote in a note to me, “but I will see you before the end of the first lesson.” My grown cousin Sam and his family came with a bag of various items, including a ruler that changed colors depending upon the light falling on it and a composition book of about a hundred pages. On a few of the pages Sam had drawn some of the men in my life. “You can do school work on the rest,” he said and winked. At three months old, I had sat at his wedding on my mother’s lap in the second row of the drafty church on Minnesota Avenue.

Five days before I started school, my mother’s father, a widower of seven months, came and had three beers and had to stay the night on our couch. “I got a little beside myself yesterday,” he confessed to me the next morning before counting out and handing me five one-dollar bills. I held my hands out for the money and thought of the first memory of my life—my grandfather playing little piggy on my toes when I was four weeks old. At eight months old, I sat again on my mother’s lap at her mother’s funeral. And at one year and two months, I sat at another church when my grandfather married his second wife, who was to die in less than a year.

Finally, the night before school started, three hours before sunset, my father’s father came and tapped twice, as always, on our door. My parents had long ago offered him a key, as he lived less than a block away, but he always said he wanted a key to no man’s home but his own. My father’s father gave me a wooden pencil box he had paid a man fifty cents to carve my name into. And he gave me a red plastic transistor radio. My seven-year-old cousin, who had learned to read at three years old, would later dismiss the radio as junk because it was made in Japan. But I never cared. “Don’t take it to school, sugar,” my grandfather said that evening. “I already put the battries in, but you can’t take it to school.” I pulled out the silver antenna and looked up at him. Perhaps for months and months I had never taken the idea of school very seriously. The idea now stepped before me and for a moment seemed to blot just about everything out of my head, the whole summer, all the playing, my happy life. I was going to school. I turned the radio on. The music burst out and bounced about the room. The radio would work well for a very long time, but toward the end of its life, I had to practically stand on my head to get station WOOK to come in clearly.

Iwas the first of my parents’ three girls, inheriting from my mother her wide blossom of a nose and the notion that the universe could be lassoed and tamed. She came from a long line of Washingtonians who saw education as a right God had given their tribe the day after he gave Moses the Ten Commandments.

I inherited from my father the tendency to sleep on my side with one folded arm under my head and the other hand nestled between my thighs. I inherited from him the notion that the soil in D.C. was miraculous, that it would grow anything, even a rubber tree and oranges, which was what he managed to do. But the oranges were no bigger than cherries and they had hair and my mother would not let her girls touch them.

But this is about my father’s father. And me. And all of them.

My grandfather got as far as the second grade. “One and a half,” he would say and raise two fingers and bend one finger over. He spent most of my father’s first years as a shadow to his son. My father, at six, seven, eight years old, would turn a dusty corner in some road and happen upon a noisy crowd of men trudging to the fields in that place five miles outside of Columbia, South Carolina, men who laughed when my father asked if they had seen his father. My father would wake in the darkest part of the night and hear his father snoring somewhere in their cabin, only to find him gone in the morning. Sometimes, before morning hit, my father, hungry for the man, would rise and stand before the bed my grandfather shared with my grandmother, and she would wake and at first think her son was her father’s ghost. And there were nights, too, when my father would watch my grandfather in a piss and drunken sleep on the floor just inside the open front door, the last place he had fallen once he had crawled home. If my father touched him there in the doorway, my grandfather would groan, responding to the life in his dreams—perhaps a fist coming at him, or the candlelight reflecting off a third jar of moonshine, or the sliver of the thigh of a woman not his wife as she telegraphed something while crossing her legs.