Edward Jones - All Aunt Hagar's Children

She had been married for nine months. Terence Stagg was in medical school at Howard. His maternal grandparents, the attorneys, had been killed in a car accident by a drunken driver who was himself an attorney, and they had left their only grandchild more money than was good for him. Terence and his wife lived more than well in a part of upper Northwest Washington where the Benningtons could only serve and never live.

Just before Sharon reached 35th Street, the group of young men came under a streetlight and she could see that two of them were white and the third was black. The black one, six or so feet from her, said to the white ones, “I spy with my little eye something good to eat,” and the three spread out and blocked her from passing. “I always have these fantasies about nurses and sponge baths,” the black one said. She was wearing a white uniform and that had told them all they needed to know. They came to within three feet of her and one of the white ones held his arms out to Sharon, while the other two surrounded her. She did not hear the car door behind her open and close.

The black one touched her cheek and then her breasts with both hands and one of the white students did the same, and both young men breathed sour beer into her face. Sharon pulled away, and the two looked at each other and giggled. The third student gave a rah-rah cry and came up and slapped her behind twice. As the black student inhaled deeply for another blast into her face, something punched him in the side of the face and the black student fell hard against a car and passed out. “Hey! Hey!” the white student who had had his hands on Sharon said to the puncher. “Whatcha do to our Rufus?” The puncher pulled Sharon back behind him and she saw that it was a face from a long time ago, and her knees buckled to see it. He may well have been a ghost because she had not seen him in that long a time. “They spoil the best nights we have,” Derek said to her.

The white student who had not touched her pulled out a knife, the blade more than three inches. Derek reached into his own pocket, but before his hand came out, the white student had stabbed him in his left side, through his leather jacket, through his shirt, into the vicinity of his heart, and Sharon screamed as Derek first faltered and then pulled himself up. In a second his switchblade was out and the blade tore through the student’s jacket and into his arm, and the student ran out into P Street and down toward his university. “I wanted to keep this clean,” Derek said. “But white trash won’t let me.”

“Hey! Hey!” the second white student said as he sobered up. “We didn’t mean anything.” He raised his arms high. “See, see…”

“Oh, you fucks always mean somethin,” Derek said, holding his knife to the man’s cheek and flicking it once to open a wound in the cheek, less than two inches from his nostrils. The man crumpled, both hands to his face. His black friend was still out, and the man with the arm wound was shouting as he ran that they were all being killed by niggers. Derek sheathed his knife and returned it to his pocket and then pulled Sharon down the street to his car.

Within moments he had driven them down P, slowly, across Wisconsin and to a spot before the P Street Bridge, where he stopped. He turned on the light and inspected his side. “Shit!” he said. “Bad but maybe not fatal. Damn!”

“Let me help you,” Sharon said.

He started the car up, and after looking in the sideview mirror he continued on down P Street, again slowly. Two patrol cars sped past them, and she watched him watching them go away in the rearview mirror. “Dead or alive, the black dude won’t matter,” he said to the mirror, joining the traffic moving around Dupont Circle. “But them white dudes are princes and the world gon pay for that.” He became part of the flow going up Connecticut Avenue. “And it happened in Georgetown. They’ll make sure somebody pays for that. But they were drunk and so describin might be a problem. Real drunk.” He seemed unaware that she was there. “Thas why I never went to college, Derek. Black people gotta leave all their common sense at the front door. College is the business of miseducatin. Like them people would ever open the door anyway.” She feared he might pass out, and in the near darkness of the car, she was comforted by the fact that she could not see blood creeping around to the right side from the left. Two more police cars passed them, screaming. “They gonna pull that one patrol car they have in Southeast and the only one they got in Northeast and bring em over here to join the dozens they keep in Georgetown. You watch, Derek,” he said to the mirror. “You just watch.”

“Derek,” she said. “Stop and let me help you.”

They had crossed Calvert, they had crossed Woodley, and he looked at her for the first time since they entered the car. “I lied,” he said. “I lied. Red wasn’t a bad color. It was way good anough for you. Any color you put on is a good color, didn’t you know that? You make the world. It ain’t never been the other way around. You first, then the world follows.” They were nearing Porter. Two blocks from the University of the District of Columbia he stopped, not far from her condominium building, which had one of the few doormen in Washington. “You can walk the rest of the way home,” he said. “All the bad thas gonna happen to you done already happened.”

She moved his jacket aside and saw where the blood had darkened his blue shirt, and when she touched him, the blood covered her hand and began to drip. “Come with me and let me help you.” And as she said this, her mind ticked off the actual number of years when she had last seen him. Three days later she would have the time down to weeks. She took a handkerchief and Kleenex from her pocketbook and pressed them gently to his side. “It’s bad, but manageable, I think. We need to get you help, though.”

He took her hand and placed it in her lap. “Let me be,” he said. “You best get home. You best go home to the man you married to.”

“Come in. You helped me, so let me help you.”

“You should tell that glorious husband of yours that a wife should be protected, that he shouldn’t be sleepin while you have to come home through the jungle of some white neighborhood. Tell him thas not what bein married should be about.”

She took the bloody handkerchief and Kleenex and returned them to her pocketbook. She did not now want to go home. She wanted to stay and go wherever he was going to recover. She snapped the pocketbook shut. Her father had walked her down the aisle, beaming all the way at the coming together of his two favorite families. The church had been packed and Terence had stood at the end of the aisle, waiting, standing as straight as he could after a night of drinking and pals and two strippers who had taken turns licking his dick for half of that night.

“You best go home.” “Please,” she said. “Let me stay.” He reached across her and opened the door. “And one last thing,” he said. “Neil been at me for the longest time to have me tell you it was never him. He was always afraid that you went about thinkin he was stuck on you, and he always wanted me to set the record straight. Now the record is straight.” How long can the heart carry it around? How long? The answer came to her in a whisper.

She got out and shut the door, and he continued on up Connecticut Avenue, his back red lights, throbbing and brightly vital, soon merging with all the rest of the lights of the Washington night. Her BMW was in the shop. The man had promised that it would be ready by the end of the week. Terence’s Mercedes had never seen a bad day.

As soon as she locked the door to the condominium, she heard the hum of the new refrigerator, and then the icemaker clicked on, and ice tumbled into the bucket, as if to welcome her home. The fan over the stove was going and she turned it off, along with the light over the stove, the two switches side by side. In the living room she noticed the blood on her uniform; if the doorman had seen it, he did not say. In the half darkness, the spots seemed fresh, almost alive in some eerie way, as if they had just that second come from Derek’s wound. Bleeding. Bleedin. She had emerged unscathed. The overhead fan of grand, golden wood in the living room was going, slowly, and she considered for the longest whether to switch it off. In the end she chose to stop the spinning. Her family had moved away from 8th Street when she was in college. And so had the Forsythes and the Spoonhours and the Prevosts and all the people she had known as she grew into womanhood. We are the future, her father-in-law Lane Stagg had proclaimed at a final dinner party at the Sheraton Hotel for the good neighbors. Who was left there now? Bad neighbors, her father had called those who came after them. Bad neighbors. Before the whites came back and planted their flags in the new world. The motor on the fish tank hummed right along; the light over the tank was on and she turned that off. The expensive tropical fish swam on even without the light. The stereo, which had cost the equivalent of seven of her paychecks, was not playing but the power light was on and she pushed the button to put the whole console to rest. She placed one finger against the fish tank, and all the fish in their colorful finery ignored it. Her father had risen at that hotel dinner and given the first toast, his hand trembling and his voice breaking at every fifth word. And he was followed by Lane Stagg, who was as eloquent as ever.