Edward Jones - All Aunt Hagar's Children

At that patch of nowhere in Mississippi, three colored people got off, and a pregnant Negro woman and a white man got on. They were married, though none of the Negroes knew that. Instantly, there arose in their hearts a disdain for the white man and a you-po-put-upon-thang attitude for the woman, who was some seven or eight months in the family way. They waited for the white man to leave, perhaps to go to one of the cars for whites, or, more likely, to leave the train altogether. After all, he had had his pleasure. But he followed the woman to a seat two down and across from Anne. He stored two suitcases above the seat. When she was seated, he helped the woman take off her shawl and folded it and made a pillow for her head, then he knelt, unhooked her shoes, and began to massage her stockinged feet. The Negroes could see that they were not yet thirty. The train’s engine snorted right and left, shimmied, and then started up. In five blinks of Anne’s eyes, it was on its way. The seat of the Negro woman accompanied by the white man was facing Anne, who saw the woman with her head still leaning back, her eyes closed as the man worked her feet in his hands. The Negroes around the couple, some standing, some sitting, were silent and they, all but the smallest children, looked at one another. Maybe he was not really white. He took a pair of yellow slippers from his coat pocket and put them on the woman’s feet. He stood and took off his hat and nodded to just about every Negro head in the car, and then he removed his coat. The man took the seat at the window beside the woman and disappeared from Anne’s view. The Negro woman’s head was still back and she opened her eyes before long and smiled at the older couple in the seats facing hers and the white man’s, then she looked at the white man and smiled. The oldest person in the car—the woman of the couple facing the Negro woman and the white man—asked them in a voice many heard, “Yall goin far?” The pregnant woman nodded and smiled some more. “Yes, ma’am.” They knew he was white when the conductor came in twenty minutes later and said in a loud voice, in a voice white people had for each other when they knew one was making a mistake in the presence of Negroes, “You sure this where you want to be?” “I’m sure,” the white man said. Many of the adults in that car would live to see the first man on the moon, and a good bunch of those would never believe it had happened. That scene with the white man and the Negro woman was far more incredible; but those who believed would do so because the scene on the train had come to them unfiltered, without the use of some camera operated by the space people out to try to trick their eyes.

Well after St. Louis, the car’s population became more or less stable, with most of the people there going on to Washington, including the pregnant woman and the white man. The Negroes started calling him “Mr. Feet,” and he never took offense. Anne continued to see little of her working husband, but she was content and busied herself with getting to know her fellow passengers. In the end, she became as at home with them as the people around Picayune. “My Picayune people,” she thought at one point after finishing a piece of sweet potato pie from a man five seats down, “my Picayune folks who never even saw Picayune.” They shared food, they shared stories about home, about Southern places that would be the foundation of their lives in the North. None of them could know that the cohesion born and nurtured in the South would be but memory in less than two generations. The one thing that Anne told her grandson and his recording machine about the trip was the story of the child who got on with her parents not long after they left Missouri. This honey-colored child of one year, she said, going up and down the aisle in her diaper as if she were at home, stopping at nearly every seat and conversing in her gibberish as she rested her hands on someone’s thigh or knee. “People talked to her like every word of hers made sense. And she talked back the same way. She was my child, she was that woman over there’s child. She was that man down there’s child, that man that fiddled to her goin up and down the aisle. I’ve always wondered what happened to her. We could talk to her or pick her up when she fell and we could know things would turn out good for us where we was goin.” All the people in that car would have said two generations was a long time. It was, and yet it was not.

Somewhere in Tennessee, after a somewhat quiet afternoon, she remembered the snow scene tapestry and longed to work on it to give her restless hands something to do. She had not seen her husband in many, many hours, and not knowing any better, full of the peace and joy she had gotten from being in the cabin, she ventured out beyond her own car, out there to where the white people were, thinking she might see George for a second. Let him know she was thinking of him. She knew she could never sit beyond her own place, but she did not think there was any harm in just finding her husband and giving him a little “Hi you doin?” It was in the third car of white diners that she saw the back of George. He was standing before the conductor, the same man who had asked if the white man from Mississippi wanted to come and be with them. George’s head was not down, but it was not raised either. The conductor was talking somewhat loud to her husband. Certainly loud enough to disturb the digestion of the closest diners. His words were very harsh. The conductor was taller than George, and when he saw Anne, he indicated with his raised chin that there was one more thing George should attend to.

George turned slowly and his eyes widened to see his wife. He had already been shamed before all the white people, and now here was his wife. He was quickly before Anne and took her painfully by the shoulder and practically pulled her along back to the front car. He forced her down into her seat and shouted, “When I put you in a seat, I mean for you to stay there!”

“Now, George, wait here a minute—”

“I mean for you to stay where I put you!” He went back to work.

The car was silent, and they all felt for her because she was family. Why would he treat our Anne that way?

The experience was so completely humiliating that Anne wanted first only to cry. But she, her father’s child, began to encase herself so that everything around her disappeared and she started making her way back to Mississippi. She stayed to herself for many hours, hearing and seeing nothing about her though her eyes remained open. George did not come back to her and that made it easier for her. People tried speaking to her, but she did not respond. She began to see that very foolish girl, saying foolish things into the mirror. That foolish girl had fooled herself into marriage and had been knocked straight on her way to her new home, even before she had consummated the marriage.

Along toward evening, as the car went on with its life, she felt that not a single person had anything in common with her. It was just before nine o’clock that she, with the clearest mind yet, knew that the marriage was in tatters and should never have happened. Whatever little bit of it there was at that moment would be dead before they reached Washington. It was better to know that now, before they had become a proper man and wife, better to have such a large mistake over and done with at nineteen than to carry it through in misery on into twenty-five, to thirty, to thirty-five. She had seen that with other women, but that would not be her: I could not help myself. Lord knows. Jesus, why did You turn Your back on me? Why did You make me old at forty with this man? There had been something in George’s voice that she could not forgive. Her heart was breaking, but that was in the nature of hearts, she told herself as the car quieted for the night. It was also in their nature to heal for however long it took, six months, a year, two years. After consulting with the Picayune stationmaster four days before she left, Anne’s father had given her $50 and her mother had sewn the money into the hem of her dress on a day when George was away from the house. “This will bring you home from wherever you are if you ain’t abidin mongst angels,” her mother said before breaking the thread with her teeth and finalizing the deed with a solid knot in the thread.