Edward Jones - All Aunt Hagar's Children

In my father’s eighth year, my grandmother turned her back on all the life she had known and took my father and his two sisters to Washington, where, South Carolina old folks said, people threw away their dishes after every meal because it was cheaper to buy new ones. Three months after they left, my grandfather woke soaked in dew a few feet from train tracks, having spent the night with two quarts of a cloudy brew he had bought off a stranger who said he was from Tennessee “where good likker was born.” Before he woke, my grandfather had been dreaming that a child was sticking an especially long hatpin in his right leg as he weeded a section of his collard green patch in a cruel rain. Awake at the train tracks, he tried to move that right leg but found it twisted in an awful way, so twisted, as he later learned, that only the hands of God could untwist it. He laid his head back down. He could hear a train, but his mind could not tell him if the train was coming or going. My grandfather raised his head as best he could and managed to turn it to the right, to where the sun was coming from. He saw a boy no more than five years old eating crab apples. The boy raised his hand Hello. The sun told my grandfather it was not yet seven in the morning.

He knew that a drink would tell him five minutes this way or that exactly what time it was. The boy was steady watching him. He ate the apples whole, core and all. Not long before he told the boy to go get help, my grandfather asked him why he had not awakened him, and the boy told him he had been taught never to wake a sleeping man. With each syllable of the boy’s words, the pain in his leg grew.

When it came time for me, my parents’ first girl, to go out beyond their gate that kept the world at bay and begin school, they chose Holy Redeemer, a Catholic school that was down L Street where we lived, up 1st Street, and all the way down Pierce Street to the corner of New Jersey Avenue. My father had wanted me to go to Walker-Jones Elementary. The phrase “a stone’s throw” was made for how close Walker-Jones was to us—less than a hundred feet diagonally across the intersection of L and 1st Streets, close enough for him to stretch and stretch and stretch an arm across the traffic of the intersection into some classroom and tug at one of my plaits or tweak my nose when the teacher’s back was turned. Going there, in some ways, would have been almost like never going beyond the small world of my yard.

But my mother wanted her children to be educated by nuns and priests all dressed in black, the way it had been done down through the generations with her people. Taught by people who had a firm grasp of how big and awful the world could be. My father said she was way too impressed with the fact that the nuns had taught her Spanish, and my mother reminded him that the first things she had ever said to him had been in Spanish. Before noon, Spanish was just about all my mother ever spoke to my father and my sisters and me. There was no Miss La-De-Da to it, no putting on airs, just Spanish in the morning. No one in her life spoke Spanish, but she went on and on, conversing in Spanish for long periods with some imaginary person, or conjugating verbs, staying sharp for that day some woman from Mexico, lost and without a word of English, might knock on her door and ask for help.

That first day of school, my father took off from being a postman, and he and my mother walked me up to Holy Redeemer. Registration was a rather quick process, and before long they were bending down and telling me that they would see me in a little bit. Then they were gone, but I got the notion that they were just outside the school, standing on New Jersey Avenue or Pierce Street, waiting for me to finish or for me to tell them that I had had enough and wanted to go home.

I found myself in a kindergarten room with some eighteen other children and a teacher who was not a nun and whose eyebrows came together in a hypnotic “V.” We, including our teacher, were all colored. Not long after the door was closed, a boy at our little table of four began crying. The teacher could not comfort him, but she did manage to get him down to a whimper in that first hour. I felt strangely at peace sitting next to him, as if I had done no more than move from one room in my house to another. I, too, tried to comfort him, placing my hand on his shoulder. But he looked at me as if I were part of why he had to cry. In the end, he cried so much that a nun, a white woman encased in her habit, appeared and took him away. I did not see the boy again, but whenever I thought of him, I imagined him going on to a grand life at another school where they did wonderful things he did not have to cry about.

That first day my parents were waiting for me at noon. Back at home, my father’s father was with my two sisters and Sadie Cross, my mother’s best friend from across L Street. Sadie was married to One-Eye Jack, whose left eye had been shot out across the D.C.–Maryland line by a Prince George’s County policeman as Mr. Jack innocently changed a flat tire when I was six months old. Late that night he was shot, several of his friends gathered in my father’s kitchen, cursing white people. My father had me resting on his shoulder, and he kept telling me that it would be nice if I went to sleep like a good little baby was supposed to. Within two weeks of Mr. Jack being shot, the policeman’s Laurel lawyer and the Prince George’s County government people sent Mr. Jack separate letters designed to head off anything legal Mr. Jack might consider. The lawyer’s letter, with the law firm’s name embossed in gold letters across the first page, was two pages, double-spaced, and it related how Mr. Jack, kneeling on the ground as he fixed the tire in Mitchelville, had in fact threatened the policeman’s life. Mr. Jack had not only threatened the man’s life, the letter said, but the life of the policeman’s wife, at home asleep in her bed in Rockville. Had Mr. Jack killed the policeman, the letter said, life as the wife then knew it would cease to be. The policeman had no children but nevertheless Mr. Jack had endangered them and all the policeman’s generations to come for hundreds of years, because if the policeman had been murdered by Mr. Jack, none of those people would ever be born. Back at home, we celebrated my first day of school in the backyard with a feast my grandfather and Miss Sadie had prepared, including some fruits and vegetables my father had grown and which my mother allowed her girls to eat.

When the meal was done, my grandfather stood me before him as he sat and took my hands in his. “They treat you okay up there?” he asked. Anyplace he ever mentioned was always “up there.”

I nodded. He started to count the fingers on both my hands, five pigs on one hand, five pigs on the other. Before I left that morning he had had me knock three times on his wooden leg for good luck. “You still got all your toes, too, I guess,” he said now and smiled. “The nuns can sell a little girl’s fingers and toes for a lotta money up there at the K Street market.” He picked me up and sat me on his left leg, his good leg.

“Now my teacher,” he said, “was a mean old colored man who had the Devil in him.” I was still in one of the dresses my uncle from Philadelphia had bought me, though the dress was now covered with a towel tied around my neck. My youngest sister was asleep across my father’s lap, and my mother had put her middle child down inside for her nap. Miss Sadie was sitting next to my father. Her son was nine, a boy with thick eyeglasses who lived for books. He was a good son, named Jack after his father, and all the world praised him.

I told my grandfather about my new teacher.

“She’s no kin to that teacher of mine, I can tell you that,” my grandfather said. “Oh, how my teacher did have the Devil in him. And you know what? If you gave him a wrong answer, he’d take his pitchfork and bring it down on your desk, them that had a desk. Put holes in the thing and made it hard to write your lessons.” My grandfather’s right leg was made of the same wood used for coffins down in his part of South Carolina. “Itty-bitty holes in the desk. You’d be writin, ‘The grass is green,’ and just when you got to the green part, your pencil would sink down in one a them pitchfork holes.” My grandfather stretched out his wooden leg. We were mostly in the shade of the afternoon, but a bit of the sun covered his wooden foot in his well-shined shoe.