Knee-Deep in Wonder (2 page)

So it was little wonder that Ed's insurance company never really got off the ground. His pledge—that if anything went awry there'd be money to cover it—seemed too good to be true. People's suspicious natures affected both Ed's business and Helene's young life. She was the child whose dresses had been bought from the sickness and death of others, and though her presence never stirred up real hatred—no hair of hers was stolen and burnt in the flame of red candles, no one spat over his shoulder when she walked by—Helene was treated with careful negligence. Children avoided her because, plucked and placed every six months, she gave off the heady smell of a dying flower, too bright and colorful to belong to third grade. Children were wary of her too-generous offers: “You can take all my sandwich, I ate before I left the house.” Loud laughter that should have been only a small snicker made them doubt their sharp wit. Their rejection didn't really matter, since Helene was never in one place long enough to stop being a stranger. Instead, she moved, always just beyond Lafayette County. Helene's life took on the shape of a clock. Uncle Ed would set them down in the middle of the short hand and then take them to the tip of the long hand, and Queen Ester was always the little knob at the center.

At eighteen, Helene tried to leave the clock behind, flinging herself into Spelman College, where she learned to press her hair and talk on the phone with confidence about the late work of Jackson Pollock. Following graduation she grabbed a bus to Seattle and hitched a ride to Palo Alto, trying hard not to stare at the white girls with short skirts and no panties who could talk and smoke cigarettes at the same time, each floating word visible in the air. But Helene knew that she was still sitting somewhere on time's long hand, that the face of the clock in which she lived had no perimeter.

Off and on she would come back to Uncle Ed and Aunt Annie b, to Stamps, Arkansas, where they had retired. She trickled into their lives with letters from Little Rock, where she was a nurse's aide, then with a handful of phone calls from Jonesboro and later Washington, D.C., until, finally, Helene in full landed in a heap at their doorstep, stiff from a four-hour bus ride. She readied a soft smile with just a bit of teeth to show grief, sympathy, and love all at the same time. But her smile failed when Uncle Ed opened the door. Annie b's death had chipped away at the traces of youth; a shock of gray now crowned her uncle's head. In the fall of 1976, Helene realized she was surrounded by the old, the dead, and the dying.

2

SWOLLEN AND BROODING
, a mother-to-be spent nights dreaming of the palest brown baby boys skipping through trees, their hair bouncing free of tangles. She knew the destiny of mulatto children: to sing “Them Golden Slippers” with James Bland or learn how to play slide banjo for The South Before the War minstrels. She coveted that life. And she thought these things because she believed in the Bible, coaxed along by ignorance and her grandmother's interpretations. Negroes were damned, descendants of Cain, not to be mistaken for the chosen ones, the Israelites. Notwithstanding all their oppression, the Israelites had legions upon legions of philosophers and poets. Or perhaps the Negro was not even the descendant of Cain but simply the mark, the smudge—God's smearing of Cain's forehead or cheek—since Cain, cursed or not, was not only destined to build cities but had been touched by God of His own volition. So Negroes couldn't even claim Cain as their ancestor; the cities did not belong to them. Maybe they were the descendants of Esau, who'd sold his birthright to Jacob for a bowl of soup and then God and Jacob laughed. Yes, the Negro was the truly damned, without a glimmer of respite or hope. So she prayed that the seed in her belly was light, because a black one … She shuddered at the dark thought.

Two months later, with her knees pulled up, the woman held the tiny baby. She sat up slightly to pass the newborn back into the arms of a midwife, who then laid the child slightly above the mother's crotch. The midwife, who had grasped and pulled the tiny woolly head, spoke softly to the new mother, “Look more like you, wouldn't you say?” She smiled at the woman, whose lifted knees shaded part of her face.

“No, wouldn't say; that thing look nothing like me,” the woman whispered back, angry not only because in the end she had made exactly what she was, but because all her plotting had been for naught—months of lemons and fish oil, the calculated submission to cravings, eating out-of-season melon dipped in salt. You turn out too black to belong to me spite all I did, she thought, while panting out the afterbirth. As her belly had grown, she'd envisioned the creamy blend she was sure she'd produced. It would have been a new beginning, a life marked with questions like, “Where y'all get that baby from?” while she would smile demurely and reply, “Oh, he's mine.” She wanted a child that would lift her and her husband out of their poverty with his beauty; scores of back doors would open for them, and inside minstrel shows would wait. Their child could have played the ragtime drums with Buddy Bolden in New Orleans or sung with Willie “The Lion” Smith.

Raising her arm, she ran her hand over her own features—the wide full lips, the splayed nose—and sighed. She stared at her baby's face. Deep dark-brown eyes held a sadness the woman believed only she alone possessed. Naw, she thought, you ain't seen the down, down part of sorrow. That got my name on it.

A soft rap sounded at the door. The young woman, her hair damp and knotted around her head, moved her knee and saw the midwife's mouth stir, chewing words, but she couldn't hear what was being said, her panting eclipsing any other sound. Outside the door was her husband, panting too, his sweat pouring into his stiff collar because he heard nothing inside the small bedroom. He knocked again. “I told you, that's your man,” the midwife said, pointing behind her.

“What?”

“The door, gal. You hear?”

“I hear it.”

“Well?”

“What?”

“You want me to get it or don't you?”

“Get it.”

“I asked you that before and then you go off and act like you don't hear me say what I just got through saying.”

The man prepared to knock at the door a third time, but then he heard the soft even voice of the midwife and his wife's light reply followed by laughter chasing their quick-spoken words, as if they were sitting around a worn deck of cards and not a newborn child. He let his hand drop as he heard a delicate rustling. The door creaked open.

“Well?” he said.

“A baby girl,” said the midwife.

“Oh.”

“Black as tar.” Her lips opened wide then. Toothless. He saw nothing but her brown gums. What he'd heard before hadn't been laughter but harsh cackling. “And she like to kill it, too, going still like she did when I told her she got to push.” The husband nodded. “You know what the first thing she told me?” the midwife continued. “First thing out of her mouth?” She stuck her pinkie in her ear, pulled it out, and cleaned the wax refuse with her thumbnail. “‘I didn't want no gal, neither.' Ain't that something?” Both the midwife and the husband looked at the young woman in the bed.

The wife stared back at her husband and said to the midwife, “You get on out that door and get it off me.”

“Why come? It's yours.”

“You heard me, get out the door and get it off.” The midwife, leaving the door ajar, shuffled back to the bed and scooped the child in her arms.

“Now what?”

“Take it, and you and him get on out.” The woman turned away from them, lifting her knees higher still, trying to move away from the afterbirth that grew cold between her legs. “And you pay her with what we got.” She contemplated the wall while she spoke to her husband.

The midwife stooped and picked up the basket she had brought with her. “I guess you can clean yourself up?” she asked, but the woman said nothing. “Sally in Our Alley” played its tune in her head while she fixed her eyes on the banjo case that sat in the corner. She heard the bedroom door bang shut and the slow onset of murmured voices in the front room. In the midst of the husband's bargaining (No, planting seed during cotton season is too much, he said, how about putting sheet metal on the hole on your roof?) came the old woman's swift glare surveying the small house, the uneven table, the bottom broke out of chairs (No, I don't think you can manage my roof). Absorbed in the wife's unhappiness (no minstrel show awaited them, the child was too dark for black-face; no one would ever ask where they got the girl because the answer was obvious), they forgot to name her. When husband and wife remembered three weeks later, the wife thought long and said finally, “Just don't name her at all.”

But the man didn't take her at her word and gave his wife names to ponder: Mary Beth, Ruth Ann. He looked for something to light up her face, watching for something to dawn in her and say, Yes, that's right, I like that. Eve just went to the well; Ester went to boss for seed; You better get Abigail some kind of dress. The child thought her flux of names was due to the growth of her feet and the surge of her height until her father told her different, and then she too watched and waited.

Neither of them had to wait for long. Perhaps they should have known, if not the child then at least the father, who woke in the night to hear his wife muttering, “Two dollars for the seed—yes, Lord—two dollars for that seed and boss man charge us five and a quarter; then to rent out them supplies is well nigh ten dollars a year, and Lord know we could hitch out to Athens and get it used for half that.” He must have noticed and wondered at the new attention his wife gave to hemming, how she went out of her way to take in extra work. Yes, he must have known, since when she finally told him in the middle of the night, her hand clawed around his shoulder shaking him fiercely awake, he didn't seem surprised at all, just concerned. I can see what she fixing to say fore she do. Now here she come, lying to me like I been blind all these weeks and can't see a thing. Still, she shook him while she whispered hoarsely, “Hey, man, get on up. I got to talk. You hear? I got to talk.”

He rose to his knees and caught her about the waist. “What is it now?”

She began, not realizing that she spoke as if they had been talking all along. Her voice was stripped of all charm; she was desperate, even though she didn't have to be since the husband had already been wondering where she kept that bag of tightly hemmed camisoles, unlaced bloomers, and the only pair of shoes they owned. “I been thinking. We gone to owe boss man fifty-two dollars at the end of this season, and I know that tween the two of us we only gone make forty-six. That's if I take in some sewing and all that.”

“You woke me on up to tell me how much we owe boss man?”

“You listen. I reckon we been at this for damn near ten years.” She paused, breathing heavily. “Well?”

“Well, what?”

“Ain't that right? Ain't we been here nigh ten years?”

“I reckon so.”

“I know it. I know it.” Her eyes lit, as if she had caught him admitting something he shouldn't have. “And fore then, your people had this same shake of land and boss man passed on to you all they owed him.”

“You think I don't know that?”

“I know you do. You just listen.” She shook him again, hard, on the arm. “With all that past money and the money we owe boss man too—well, that's well nigh one hundred and thirteen dollars. You know that, man?”

“Well, I reckon; I ain't thought on it that much, but that seem bout right.”

“Now, how is we suppose to get out from under that kind of money?” She pulled back from him, her eyes triumphant, since they both knew that one hundred thirteen dollars might as well have been three thousand. They never could pay off boss man. Her hand moved from his arm to his lap. Both remembered that their daughter lay in the front room, unaware that her mother dreamed of numbers that smelled like money.

For a moment they said nothing, each waiting for the other to bare grievous teeth. But then he whispered, “I never wanted no baby in the first place.”

“Well, you got your way, cause she sho ain't no baby no more.”

“Still—”

“You shut it.” She stood up abruptly. “I can't take it like this no more.” She stopped again as if an idea had come upon her mid-flight, but the husband knew better. He saw a staged pause. “New Orleans or San Francisco. Get to see Billy Birch and Mr. Cotton, you know. Maybe … we could start there, and get a boat to some island. You think on it. If it's a no, I'll leave you too.” He almost smiled, since this was what he'd expected as soon as she woke him.

“You can't leave me. Where you gone go without me?”

“What you trying to say? You ain't coming?”

“We got a baby girl.”

“You done looked at her? She ain't no baby, bout as tall as me.” She walked away from her husband, her bare feet soundless as she paced, though he heard the soft whisk of her dress. He realized she might as well be talking about a shirt she owned, too frayed for wear and now useless.

“And?”

“And what? This all you want? Living like this, with grease brown paper for windows? This all you want? That's all?”

“You know it ain't.”

“Well, that's all she can give us. Can't crawl from up under the debt we's in cause the boss man done fixed the books. That's all she give us.” She stopped in front of her husband.

“I don't want no black tar-baby girl. Didn't even want no girl, and look what I got. I wanted a son to play banjo for the shows in Missouri. Why I got to take with me something I didn't want in the first place?” Both the husband and wife had raised their voices, and their daughter, tall but slight on the thin pallet in the front room, had shivered awake and trembled when she heard her mother. “I'm telling you now. First space I see, I'm gone.”