Edward Jones: All Aunt Hagar's Children

Some of Anne and Lucas’s children would have been farmers and married other farmers, but there would have been others who would go off to St. Louis or Chicago or Detroit. And many of their farming grandchildren would have followed their relatives north. Anne and Lucas would grow old seeing their world thinning out. A house where some child or grand of theirs first lived as a married soul would come to stand empty or be inhabited by other people—good folks maybe, but nevertheless unrelated to the Turners; and so she would tell Lucas as they went about in their wagon, then in their car, to take another route because while that married child was fine and happy in St. Louis, that didn’t help her inconsolable heart traveling down a bumpy Mississippi road. During the summers and some holidays, their world would repopulate again with children and grands and great-grands coming home in big cars and with presents and the city ways of people who lived in places where saying no to white people was an every-other-day thing. Back home, back in Mississippi, the grands especially might not even know how to act. “It’s a free country” didn’t translate in Mississippi. There was a strain in both Anne and Lucas that would have produced a teenage grandson with a hat cocked Chicago-style who would have had to cut short his two-month summer vacation after three days. Or end up at the bottom of the river, anchored there with a seventy-pound cotton gin fan tied to his neck with barbed wire.

Lucas would have died first, for that was just the way his people were. A heart attack as he stepped out of the field to get a drink of water. And then, way later on, it would be Anne’s peaceful turn, far into the night after a good meal and after some grandchild or great-grandchild had read something to her from a schoolbook or from the Bible, and after one more dream about Lucas going off to the fields and never returning. All her kin would come back to bury her, from Chicago, St. Louis, Washington, New York, the county next door. To praise her good name at a funeral preached at Everlasting Light Baptist Church, where the funerals of her parents had been preached, where they would have had the funeral of one or more of her own children, dead of whooping cough or dead of falling down a well or dead of just not having been born with enough life. “We’re jealous of God this mornin,” the preacher would begin at her funeral, “cause He’s sittin with our Anne and we won’t be able to sit and talk with her again until nine and a half minutes after we step through them Pearly Gates. We’re jealous of You this mornin, yes, but we must thank You for all the livelong days we had with her, O Lord. We’re thankful for every single minute, but still we can’t help but be jealous this mornin….” So Anne Perry Turner’s life would have come to an end. And God would lick the tip of His forefinger and turn the page. Ashes to ashes. Dust to Mississippi dust.

But Anne Perry had a cousin, a sleeping car porter, and he came to the October homecoming at Everlasting Light with his friend, another sleeping car porter, George Carter. Anne’s cousin had set off a year before to make a new life in Chicago, but on the train just before St. Louis, a man in a gray suit and purple tie and wearing tiny black-and-white, two-tone shoes told him about Washington, D.C. “They treat colored people like kings and queens in Washington, cause thas where the president lives. Would they treat colored people anything but good in a city where the president hangs his hat and pets his dog and snores beside Mrs. President every night? Now would they?” Being who he was, Anne’s cousin took too long in answering, so the man in the gray suit gave him the words, “No. Course not. They wouldn’t do such a thing to us.” Anne’s cousin got off the train in St. Louis and exchanged the rest of his ticket to Chicago for one going to Washington, where he didn’t know a soul. The cousin never once wondered why—if D.C. was the Promised Land, “a place where,” as the purple tie man had said, “men dying in the desert dreamed of”—why the man on the train, as he himself had confessed, had never actually seen the city but had lived all his life in Gary, Indiana.

Anne’s cousin and George Carter were good friends, lived on the same floor in a house on Corcoran Street, N.W., and though George was born and raised in Washington, he usually had the humility of a patient farmer who had worked his whole life behind a mule. He had seen New York and Chicago and Philadelphia and he knew that while his D.C. was fine for him, it did not rise up and command the sky the way other places did. Anne’s cousin—returning home for the first time since leaving—and George got off the train the first day of the Everlasting Light homecoming and got a ride the few miles to the church after they bought just about all the soft drinks at a little store near the train station. “I don’t wanna go home with just the presents in my suitcase,” the cousin told George, informing him that at such gatherings everyone brought something for everyone else to share. “They call these sodas up in Washington,” the cousin bragged to his great-aunt at the homecoming, “and we drink em all day long.” The aunt was blind and nearly toothless and she took two slow sips of the orange soda George had handed her. “Taste just like the soft drink they got over to the white man’s sto,” she said.

The cousin came in his blue wool suit, and George had on his brown wool suit. The suits were too warm for Mississippi in October, but the young men got points for looking good, even as the sweat rained down their faces through the long day, their coats resting on their arms or over their shoulders most of the time so people could see their pants matched up real nice with the coats. The cousin introduced George to just about everyone at the homecoming, which was held to the right of the church. The cemetery was over to the left, where Anne’s dead were resting.

At about three that afternoon, the cousin got around to introducing George to Anne, who was not impressed for many reasons, but partly because she had Neddy around and Lucas wasn’t too far away. Her mother’s remark about pretty weighing nothing had been one month before, not yet long enough for Anne to know that Neddy might not be the one. There was even someone named Hayfield just waiting to come onstage. And Washington, unlike St. Louis or Chicago, was a universe away. Too far for a young woman still used to adoring her face to have dreams about. George, with his fancy wool suit, was sweating from doing no more than saying, Hi you doin, Hi yall doin this afternoon, not a sign of a man used to hard work. Anne thought as she took him in with one hurried glance, If he sweats with just this much work, how much work could he ever manage behind a plow? Years and years later, George Carter, speaking into a cassette-recording machine, would say to the grandson named for him that he wanted to walk away, walk all the way back to the train station, because in her eyes he had seen how limited his life on the rails had been.

As Anne shook his hand and told him welcome to Picayune, she spied Ned over his shoulder saying something to Clarice Tilman. At one point Clarice threw her head back and laughed to the sky. “Hope you have a good time here, Mr. Carter,” Anne said without thinking, still shaking his hand. Clarice wasn’t a fast girl; she was a good girl from a good family, raised to know right from wrong. She had some lemonade in one hand and after she laughed, she drank a long time from her mason jar, not seeming to care that Ned had to wait for her to finish before he could say something else that would make her laugh. And wait he did. Anne did a quick look around to see where Lucas was, but she could not find him in the crowd of people standing and sitting. She couldn’t find Hayfield, either. George said after she pulled her hand from his, “It’s a hot day but I think I’m gonna make it.” Anne, with her mind elsewhere, did not hear him. She had already seen how perfect the day was, if a mind was in a state to enjoy it. Years and years later, she would describe for her grandson, talking into the cassette-recording machine, the dress Clarice was wearing, the way her free hand hung limply out in front of her, the way her other hand went halfway around the mason jar. “Yesterday is a hundred years ago,” she would say to him, “but the look and the pattern and the color of that dress, they’re with me right now. I could paint it in extreme detail like I just saw it this mornin.”