Edward Jones - All Aunt Hagar's Children

“I don’t care about that,” Terence said. “You’re just going to have to move that thing somewhere else.”

Her mother Grace had been trying to teach her to control her temper, but Amanda knew there were days and then there were days. “First off,” Amanda said, “I ain’t movin shit. Second off, it ain’t no thing. It’s a classic. Third off, you better get out my damn face. This a free country, man. You ain’t no fuckin parkin police.” She closed the trunk with both hands to make the loudest sound she could manage.

“I would expect something like this from trash like you.”

She flicked the Kleenex at him and he dodged it. “Since it’s that way, you the biggest trash around here.” She had seen him about many times, and in another universe before that moment she would have liked him to come across the street and knock at her door and invite her to the Broadway on 7th Street for a movie and a hamburger and soda afterward. She had also seen Terence’s well-dressed mother, Helen Stagg, quite often as well, had studied the woman as she came out of her house and looked up and down 8th Street as if waiting for the world to tell her that it was once again worthy of having her. She loved her own mother, in all her dowdiness, more than any human being, but she knew Grace would never be Helen Stagg. “If I’m trash, you trash.”

“Typical,” Terence said. “Real damn typical.”

“Whas up here?” Derek came across the street, his keys in his hand.

“Derek, this guy say we gotta move the car cause his father’s got the spot.”

“Ain’t nobody own no parkin spot, neighbor. This a free country, neighbor,” Derek said, the keys jingling with his arm at his side.

“I’m not your neighbor.”

“Oh, oh, it’s like that, huh?” Derek said, turning around twice and raising his arms in faux surrender. “You one of those, huh? All right.” Amanda had stayed in the street behind the car but Derek had continued on up to the sidewalk. “All right, big shot. Les just clear the way, cause I don’t want no trouble. Nobody want any trouble.” He stepped back into the gutter. “All I can say is we got a right to be there, as much right as your daddy and that Cadillac of his with that punk-ass color.” He looked at Amanda. “You done?”

“Yeah, I’m cool.”

“Well, les go,” and they waited to cross as two cars passed going up 8th Street.

“I told you to move that damn thing,” Terence said. His knuckles tapped the top of the trunk. “You people should learn to wash your ears out.” Terence spat on the car.

Derek turned. “Just leave that somebitch alone, Derek,” Amanda said. “He ain’t worth it.”

Grace Bennington came out of her house and yelled at Derek to come on in. Neil stood beside her and he held the hand of a girl of seven or eight. “Wipe that shit off,” Derek said of the spit, a slow-moving blob on the black paint heading down toward the fender. The car didn’t always run, but he kept it clean.

Derek counted all the way to ten and Terence said, “Tell your funky mother to wipe it off.”

“Even you, even poor you,” Derek said calmly, “should know the law against sayin somethin like that. Man oh man oh man…”

It took but one hit to the lower part of the jaw to send Terence to the ground. He had seen the fist coming, but because he had not been in very many fights in his life, it took him far too long to realize the fist was coming for him. Grace and Amanda screamed. The Bryants at 1401 and the Prevosts at 1404 came out, as did the Forsythes and their company who had the Trans Am, all of them still digesting their breakfast. Sharon Palmer had watched with growing concern from her bedroom window. She had not been able to hear all that was said by the three, but, on the path to love, she had admired the way Terence seemed to be standing up to Derek. By the time she got downstairs and out to the sidewalk, Amanda and Grace were comforting Terence, and only seconds after he awoke and saw the women, he told them to get the fuck away from him. Neil was holding his little sister by the hand to keep her from going into the street to be with their mother, and Derek was already back across the street and on the legless couch, watching the group around Terence and smoking a cigarette and waiting for the police to show up.

Lane Stagg was more disturbed about what had happened to his son than if it had been a mere fight between young men of equal age and status, and his Terence had simply lost after doing his best. No doubt, Lane Stagg knew, men like Derek Bennington had never learned to fight fair. Terence, after the trip from the hospital, was out of it for a day and a half, but his father did not need to hear from his son that he had been jumped before he could properly defend himself. Terence suffered no permanent damage, and he would recover and become the first person anyone in the neighborhood knew to become a doctor. “Let them crackers,” Lane Stagg said at the graduation dinner after his second drink, “write that up in their immigration brochures about how descendants of slaves aren’t any good and so all you hardworking immigrants just come on over.”

The police came out that Saturday, but because they didn’t like doing paperwork and because no white person had been hurt, Derek was not arrested. That would not be the case with the white man in Arlington who owned the Bennington home.

That Saturday evening, after the hospital visit, Lane, working on his second drink, broached the idea again of buying the house the Benningtons were renting from the white man. He sat in his living room with his wife perched on the arm of his easy chair, and across from him, on the couch, were Hamilton Palmer, Arthur Atwell, and Bill and Prudence Forsythe. Just after the third sip of that drink, Lane Stagg started in on how the neighborhood was changing for the worse. And Hamilton, already seeing the Staggs as future in-laws, agreed. He was not drinking. And neither was Bill Forsythe. Prudence had quietly come upon Bill two weeks before looking out their bedroom window at Amanda Bennington collecting toys from her front yard. Prudence watched him for more than five minutes before going to see what had captured him. Bill had a drink in his hand and Amanda was wearing the tight blue jeans she would have on the day of the fracas and it was not even one thirty. “Nice day,” Bill said to his wife, already drifting toward happy land and so unable to compose something better. “I’m fucking tired of you getting ideas,” Prudence said. “I’m fucking tired of you and your ideas.” “Honey,” Bill said, “keep your voice down. The neighbors, honey. The neighbors.” Meaning not the Benningtons on one side, but Arthur and Beatrice Atwell on the other side. She took the drink from Bill, and Prudence did it in such a way that the ice cubes did not clink against the sides of the glass.

Lane Stagg, pained about his Terence, was as eloquent that evening as he would be at the last meeting of the neighbors years later. He said that though the prior neighbors in the Bennington house had not been in the same league as those sitting now in his living room, the good neighbors of 8th Street could live with them. But he had to admit that the building had really not housed the proper sort of folk in years. “What,” he asked, “does that white man across the river in Arlington care about our neighborhood?” He had been the captain of his debating team in high school when the schools had such things. He would have made a good lawyer, everyone said. But the son of a coal and ice man rose only so far. His wife, whose father and mother were lawyers, married him anyway.

It was not a long meeting, but before it ended, they agreed that they would raise the money to buy the house from the white man who lived across the Potomac River in Arlington. The white man and his family had been the last whites to live in that neighborhood. “Come on over to Arlington,” his white former neighbors kept saying, “the blacks are all off in that neighborhood so you hardly ever see them.” The white man and his wife had a son, deep into puberty, and the son was growing ever partial to blondes, which 8th Street didn’t grow anymore.