The Truth About Butterflies: A Memoir (14 page)

One Sunday
morning late in my pregnancy, I sat in Sunday afternoon service very much ready
to go home.  Sitting on the hard pews for the lengthy services had become quite
uncomfortable.  Although it wasn’t a special service, we had lots of guests and
the small church was packed. 

At the end
of the service, just before the pastor gave the benediction, he said that
backsliders were God’s lost sheep and as saints of God, we had a Christian duty
to welcome these lost sheep back into the fold.  “Just such a sheep is amongst
us this afternoon,” he said.  I hadn’t heard any whisperings of a lost sheep
returning to the fold, so I waited to see what backslider would make his or her
way to the altar.  Then the pastor called my name. 

I sat frozen
thinking surely he’d gotten me confused with someone else.  I was sitting near
the front, and Mother Taliefero, who was at the piano, beckoned with her hand
for me to come up.  The church was completely quiet, and I was so terrified that
I thought my legs would give out.  I walked up front, and the pastor told me to
turn around and face the congregation.  Besides the visitors, even the members
looked like strangers.

As the
pastor had told me to turn around and face the people, I thought he would also
tell me what to say or perhaps he’d say it for me, make some kind of speech
about me, but there was silence.  I had no idea what I was supposed to do or
say; I hadn’t even known I was a lost sheep.  Yet there I stood with my pumpkin
belly staring out at the blank faces.  Not knowing what to say, I started
crying.  Mother Taliefero turned around on her piano bench and whispered, “Ask
the church to forgive you.”

“I’m sorry,”
I said; “please forgive me.”  Then as quickly as I could move, I went back to
my seat.  The benediction immediately followed, and before I knew it, Erma Lee
had grabbed me by the arm and was leading me out the door.  I could almost feel
the fury radiating from her.  Paw-paw always stayed after to make sure the
books were done and that everything was locked up properly, but when he made it
home, things got worse.  “Did you know about this?”  She demanded.

“No, but
it’s over now, so just let it go.”

“I ain’t
lettin’ nothing go; somebody gon’ give me some answers.”

This went on
back and forth between the two of them.  “They ain’t never had nobody else’s
chile get up there,” Erma Lee said.  “And why wait til she big and stuck out?  And
why on a Sunday mornin’?”  Paw-paw’s only answer was, “Let it go.”  But she
refused to let it rest, and she threatened to go back to the church and “mop
the floor up with every last one of ‘em!”  And Paw-paw warned that she’d better
ask God for forgiveness for making such a threat.

Going into
the kitchen to fix dinner, Erma Lee took the black, cast iron skillet she used
for cornbread and slammed it on the stove so hard, I thought surely the stove
had cracked completely in two.  She came back into the living room where I was
sitting and said, “Til the baby come, you’ll just keep yourself right here at home.” 
I was okay with it, but Paw-paw didn’t think it was a good idea.  “Let that
little girl go to church,” he said.

“Ain’t gon’
do it!  They shamed her once; they ain’t gon’ get a second chance.”  So I spent
the remainder of my time at home, and it was at home on a Sunday around 11 a.m.
when my contractions began. 

Earlier that
day, I’d decided to fry the chicken that Erma Lee had taken out for dinner. 
The side dishes were always cooked Saturday: a pot of greens or cabbage,
macaroni and cheese, yams.  The meat and cornbread were fixed Sunday after
church.  Erma Lee would come in, take off her Sunday clothes, and head into the
kitchen wearing only her slip.  If she happened to have on a half slip, she’d
pull it up until it met with her bra; she was as good as dressed. 

As I began
preparing the chicken, I discovered I didn’t know how to cut it up.  After
studying it, I cut off the wings and legs, which left the torso.  Not knowing
what to do with it, I seasoned and floured it and then fried the whole thing,
rolling it in the skillet until it was brown on all sides.

When
everyone made it back from church, Erma Lee looked at the serving dish where
I’d placed the golden brown torso flanked by its severed limbs and said, “What
in God’s name!”  It was my first and last attempt at cutting up a chicken.

Erma Lee and
I didn’t fit well together in the kitchen mostly because she wouldn’t let me
measure anything.  She’d hold the tip of her thumb and index finger together,
“That’s a pinch right there,” she’d say.  Then she’d run her thumb down to the
first joint on her finger; “That’s a teaspoon.”  The second joint was a
tablespoon and the whole finger was half a cup.

“Why can’t I
just measure it?” I’d ask.

But there
was no measuring in Erma Lee’s kitchen.  “Just
eye
it,” she’d say, but
my need for exactness hindered my ability to learn the
art of eyeing
, so
I was restricted to rinsing, peeling, and chopping.  Because of this, whenever
I could do something that I thought would impress her, I went for it.  It
usually turned out poorly.  I imagine that poor chicken arrived in chicken
heaven to the taunts and jeers of its perfectly-butchered friends.

I decided
not to tell her about the contractions even though I had begun writing down the
times of each.  At 10 p.m. when I showed her the list, the contractions were
roughly 30 minutes apart.  “What’s this?”  She asked.

“My
contractions.”

As I
suspected, she immediately phoned the on-call nurse, who told her to wait until
the contractions were five minutes apart before taking me to the hospital.  The
nurse said I should take a long, hot bubble bath and try to relax.  “No way!” 
Erma Lee protested.  “What if her water break and that baby come out while she
in the tub?”  The nurse told her that the chances of that happening were very
small.  Erma Lee didn’t care.  Soaking in the tub was out of the question.  As
it turned out, getting any sleep at all that night was also out of the question
as she woke me every hour or so to see if I was okay.

By morning,
the contractions were 10 minutes apart, and I was much more uncomfortable. 
Erma Lee called the doctor, and he said to bring me in.  After examining me, he
said, “You’re going to have baby today,” and I started crying.  “Why you are
crying?”

“I’ve
changed my mind; I don’t want to have a baby.”

“Oh now,” he
said as he rubbed my back, “you go to hospital and very soon you have beautiful
baby, okay?”  Trying to soothe me further, he asked, “Boy or girl?”

“Girl.”

“Positive?”

“Yes.”

“How you are
so sure?”

“I just
know.”

I had been
stock piling baby clothes and had encouraged those buying gifts to buy for a
girl.  Erma Lee had said I was being foolish, “You gon’ look right silly that
chile come here a boy.”

Erma Lee and
I left the doctor’s office and went straight to the hospital, arriving around
10 a.m.  By two that afternoon, I was in so much pain that I pleaded with the
nurses to “just do a surgery and take it out!” 

“We can’t,
honey.  Just hang in there; it’ll be over soon.”

That’s what
they kept saying, “It’ll be over soon,” but hour after hour it just got worse. 
By 5 p.m., the doctor arrived, and I thought sure he’d put a stop to the
madness when he saw the pain I was in.  I heard the nurse tell him that my
water still hadn’t broken.  After some whispering, the nurse said, “Honey, we’re
gonna break your water, and then things will speed up.”  The doctor whom I
thought had come to save me instead walked toward me with what looked like a
long knitting needle and told me to open my legs.  The gush of fluids was so
full that I thought the baby had come out as well.  “No,” the nurse assured
me.  “You’ll know when the baby comes.”  It would be another two hours before
what felt like a 10 pound bowling ball would finally force its way through my
pelvis.

As they
wheeled me into the delivery room, the nurse insisted that I stop pushing.  I
wasn’t aware that I
was
pushing.  Then she gripped my chin and said,
“Stop clinching your teeth and breathe!”  My body was acting of its own accord;
I wasn’t intentionally doing any of these things.  I could see the doctor
across the room at the sink scrubbed up to his elbows singing,
Oh, What a
Lovely Day
.  There was so much activity, and bright light, and pain…, but I
began pushing, and the pressure and heaviness lifted the moment the baby
slipped from my body.  The doctor looked up at me smiling and said, “You
guessed right;
he’s
a girl.”  The nurse laughed and said, “And a big
girl, too.”  Later they would tell me that she was 8 pounds, 11 ounces and 21
inches long.  Thirty-two hours after it started, it was over… or, as I would
learn, just beginning.

The next
morning, the nurse said I could get up and walk around, so I decided to take a
shower.  As I stood under the hot running water, I felt something large and
warm slide from between my legs and plop onto the shower floor.  There at my
feet was a large dark mass that could only have been one thing.  I jumped out
of the shower and began screaming for help.  For some reason, probably nothing
more than panic, I couldn’t open the bathroom door, but I could hear people on
the other side telling me to let go of the door knob.  When the two nursing
assistants rushed in, they were dumbfounded when I told them what had happened.

They called
for the nurse and when she came, one of the assistants pointed to the shower and
said, “She thinks her kidney fell out.”  The nurse looked at the mass and then
at my terror-stricken face.  She helped me back to bed where she explained that
what I thought was a kidney was simply a large blood clot, but I wasn’t buying
it.  With the pain and trauma I had endured the day before, it was very likely
that some of my organs had somehow gotten disconnected.

Finally, she
left and came back with a chart of the human body and stopping short of a full
anatomy lecture, promised me that it was physically impossible for my kidney,
or any of my other organs, to fall out through my vagina.

Christmas
morning Nicole and I came home from the hospital.  The nurse had come with a
large red Christmas stocking in her arms.  “I’ve got a surprise for you,” she
said.  Santa Claus had already come to see me the night before, so I couldn’t
imagine what the nurse was bringing me.  But as she passed me the stocking, I
could see the top of Nicole’s head.  “Usually we can hide the babies in the
stockings really well,” she said, “but she’s a very long girl.”

Although
Erma Lee had gotten on my case about buying girl’s clothes, my error had been
in buying newborn sizes.  Nothing fit; even the romper I brought her home in
was too small.  I had to bend her knees to get her feet in, and even then I
could only snap the outfit down to her waist.

Nicole was a
very content baby.  When she
did
cry, it was hardly audible.  “What’s
that hummin’ noise?” Erma Lee would ask.  Realizing it was Nicole, she’d say,
“Lawd have mercy!  Why come she can’t open her mouth and holler like a normal
baby?”

Nicole also
slept all night, which Erma Lee said wasn’t normal.  But when we took her for
her six-week check up, Dr. Tanrik said, “If she sleeps, let her sleep; she’ll
wake up if she’s hungry.”  Erma Lee, however, insisted that the baby was
malnourished, and when folks from the church would drop by to see how the new
mother was getting along, she’d tell them I wasn’t feeding the baby enough.

“Well,
Sister Erma,” they’d say, “seems like the baby would cry if she was hungry.”

“She ain’t
got the good sense to cry.  You oughtta hear her; sound like she got a mouthful
of cotton.”

I would
remind Erma Lee of what Dr. Tanrik had said, and she’d say, “Those White
doctors don’t know nothin’ bout feedin’ no Black babies,” and thus began her
remedy for my poor,
undernourished
Nicole. 

By the time
she was two months old, her diet, on top of the Enfamil with Iron, consisted of
cornbread and pot liquor.  The infant cereal, according to Erma Lee, wasn’t fit
for a gnat.  “That stuff disappear in her throat ‘fore it ever hit her gullet.” 
In spite of everything, Nicole was a healthy, happy baby.

Having a
baby at 15 was, in my opinion, the most significant thing that had happened to
me, and I had plans.  I would finish high school and college and then settle
down and be the best mother I could be.  But within weeks, my caseworker paid a
visit, and the old ghosts that I thought had been laid to rest were resurrected. 

Because I
was a ward of the court, she said, Nicole was automatically a ward of the court
and was eligible to be adopted out.  I didn’t understand it or believe it. 
That I could carry a baby for nine months, give birth, name her and bring her
home, and she not be legally mine was ridiculous.  But the caseworker’s visit
was followed by a certified letter, and whether I understood it or not, the
document made Child Service’s intentions very clear:

Filed on
January 27, 1981, in the Superior Court Juvenile Division

That said child (Nicole)
is a child in need of services as defined in I.C. 1971, 31-6-4-3: