Her Own House

by Kim McCoy

  “No, it’s the NAACP,” said the one with a slow eye.

  “No, no it’s two itty bitty niggas,” said the one lighting a cigarette.

  All five of them roared with laughter, making the beer bottles tremble. The boys remained still just like the people on TV at the lunch counters.

  “What do we do with them?”

  They leaned in close together and put their arms around each other, as if they were in a football huddle.

  “I say we fry ’em and eat ’em,” said the one with the slow eye, as he licked his lips.

  “No niggas is too salty.”

  “Noose ’em.”

  “Beat ’em.”

  “Shoot ’em.”

  They laughed again, pounding the table with their fists and slapping each other on the back. The boys were surprised that the Klan knew how to smile. They figured their lips would remain in stern straight lines.

  “Boys, we are so glad you stopped by,” said the one stroking the pistol. “How may we help you?”

  The Klan laughed again.

  “We are here because injustice is here,” Johnny said. “Just as the Apostle Paul left his village of Tarsus and carried the gospel of Jesus Christ to the far corners of the Greco Roman world, so are we compelled to carry the gospel of freedom beyond our own home.”1

  Walter looked at Johnny with awe.

  “Is that a fact?” said the one with the pistol.

  “Yes that’s a fact,” Walter said, staring directly into the Klan’s eyes.

  ‘’Funny you should mention the Bible, seeing as how God was the original segregationist.”2

  “You’ve got your facts all wrong,” Walter said.

  ‘’Boy, I know what I’m talking about. God made the white man white and the black man black, and he did not intend for them to mix,”3 the Klansman said as he slapped the table. “White, black. Up, down. Left, right. See, certain things just ain’t meant to mix.”

  Johnny stood on his toes, making himself look taller.

  “We have waited for more than 340 years for our constitutional and God given rights,” Johnny said. “We creep at a horse and buggy pace toward gaining a cup of coffee at a lunch counter.”4

  Walter nodded his head and patted his friend on the back. The Klansman with the cigarette stretched his arms in the air and yawned louder than necessary.

  “You can have your coffee—you just don’t need to drink it at my counter. All this outside agitation and law breaking is destroying the amicable relations between the white and Negro races that have been created through 90 years of patient effort by the good people of both races.”5

  “Here, here!” the other Klansman shouted.

  “Keep going, Johnny,” Walter said.

  “There’s two kinds of laws: just and unjust,” Johnny said, looking as though he belonged behind a pulpit. “A just law is a man made code that squares with the moral law or the law of God. An unjust law is a code that is out of harmony with the moral law.”6

  The Klan smiled. And Walter felt something in his hand. His baseball. The little man who had been clutching the ball now stood between him and Johnny. The boys didn’t know how long he’d been there, and the Klan didn’t seem to notice.

  “I got to hand it to you boys. You two are articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guys all around.”7

  The other Klansmen nodded their heads.

  Walter couldn’t take it anymore. He needed to get involved. He lifted his arm and pitched the ball directly between the eyes of the Klansman that had been doing all the talking. The Klansman took off his hood, revealing hair as red as his face, and trapped the ball inside of it. Walter stomped his foot, disgusted with himself. Johnny gritted his teeth.

  “What you doing, boy? Didn’t your mama ever tell you not to throw balls in the house? You’re going to break something.”

  The Klan laughed again, fueling Walter’s anger. He charged and grabbed the Klansman’s hood out of his hand. The others stood up and Johnny came closer behind Walter.

  “You’ve seen those weeping willows out there, boy. You know we fertilize them with little black niggas. If you don’t give me that hood, you’ll be next.”

  Walter reached into the hood and tossed the ball at Johnny. He ripped the hood in two as if it were a sheet of paper and not sturdy cotton. Johnny grabbed Walter’s elbow and the two ran out of the kitchen through the living room and onto the front porch. Feeling the breath of the Klan on them and waiting for a bullet to pierce their backs.

  They didn’t look back until they were off the porch and almost halfway down the path of weeping willows.

  Once on the lawn, they realized not one little man remained. Instead there were grown men—real black men—so many that the boys couldn’t even see the front of the house. They stood shoulder to shoulder wearing all black and wrapped themselves around the Klan house. A fortress that wouldn’t let anything enter or leave.

  The boys looked at each other and headed back toward the house. As they walked down the path of weeping willows they heard the humming, but this time it was different. It was free. Walter and Johnny took their places, shoulder to shoulder with the rest of the men.

  * * *

  1 From Martin Luther King, Jr.’s “Letter from a Birmingham Jail,” 16 April 1963

  2 From Mississippi Gov. Ross Barnett. The New York Times.

  3 Mississippi Gov. Ross Barnett

  4 “Letter from a Birmingham Jail”

  5 From the 1956 “Southern Manifesto” originated by South Carolina Sen. Strom Thurmond against the 1954 Supreme Court desegregation ruling

  6 “Letter from a Birmingham Jail”

  7 From Delaware Sen. Joe Biden’s comments in the New York Observer on Presidential candidate Barack Obama, 31 January 2007

  Tide

  Jené walked slowly down the concourse with her new baby pressed against her chest. A tanned blonde couple ran past her, pulling wheeled suitcases behind them. Jené imagined them returning from their honeymoon in Paris, rushing to make a connecting flight back to New York where they lived in a building with a doorman and spent $50 a week buying foaming cups of coffee with low fat soymilk. They’d probably made love on silk sheets at the L’ouest Hotel just steps away from the Champs-Elysées! That’s how the travel magazines described exciting places. They were always “steps away!” from other exciting places.

  As she passed an abandoned wheelchair, Jené considered rolling herself and her baby to The Newsstand. Her body still ached from childbirth. Wanting to look capable for her boss, she decided against it. Jené took a deep breath when she saw Joe ring up a magazine for a woman. When the customer left, Jené straightened her back and walked into the store.

  “Where the hell have you been?” Joe yelled. “When you guys don’t show up,

  I’m the one that has to fill in.”

  “I had my baby,” Jené said, lowering her eyes. “I’m ready to work.”

  The baby girl who still wore the tiny pink bow the nurse had tied to one of her black curls the day she was born let out a soft cry. Jené sighed, and stroked her baby’s back. She doubted she had enough formula and diapers to make it through the afternoon

  “That can’t be your kid,” Joe said. “You weren’t even pregnant.”

  Tall with a medium build, Jené had worn baggy sweatshirts to work for the past year and half because it was always so cold in the store. She had always been thin and having a baby didn’t seem to change that. She hadn’t changed her staple diet of peanut butter and powdered sugar sandwiches with a side of canned peaches for nutritional value.

  “I was pregnant,” Jené said. “I just didn’t talk about it.”

  Joe folded his arms and frowned. He looked like a schoolteacher ready to chastise
his student for cheating.

  “You can’t bring that kid to work,” he said. “Figure out what to do with yourself. Come back tomorrow without that kid, and you’ll still have a job.”

  Jené stared at Joe who wore a typical gold band on his left finger. He was fat and Jené figured his wife was fat too. She imagined them rolling over each other at night, like two stress balls in the palm of a hand. There was no way these two fatties could ever contort themselves into Cosmo’s position of the week. They’d give out a few minutes later, and huff and puff until they fell asleep. Then their obese kids--there were probably three or four of them--would knock on the door begging for butter pecan or cookie dough ice cream.

  “How ’bout it?” Joe said. “You can’t tell me that’s not fair.”

  “I’ll be back tomorrow.”

  Jené had been living on her own and working at The Newsstand since she graduated from high school. She had floated through high school undetected, unremembered. She used to daydream about being kidnapped. If she’d gone missing on a school field trip or on her way to the bus stop, the police would have no way to track her because she didn’t have a wallet-sized year book photo that could be flashed across the TV news or allotted a space in a newspaper column. And if the kidnapper had given her a chance to call a loved one to hint of her whereabouts as part of the psychological game he was playing with police, she would pass on the opportunity. “No thank you, Mr. Kidnapper, I’m just fine where I am.” Her mother may not have taught her much, but she did know her manners.

  Jené walked to a nearby gate where people were waiting to depart to Chicago. She looked at her baby’s face, and wondered how the tiny eyes, nose, and mouth could function so effectively. All sorts of tiny things function effectively though, ants, atoms, cells. Maybe it wasn’t all about science, maybe God had something to do with it after all. If those baby parts suddenly stopped working, if those eyes were blinded by sleep crumbs, if the nose clogged until she lost all air, if the mouth quit opening and closing for sustenance, Jené knew she’d be blamed. Monster, they’d call her. Unfit, unworthy to breed, to live. Since the baby was born, it was easy for Jené to go from awe to complete fear in a matter of seconds. But it was nice to experience awe, that was something new. Fear was nothing special.

  When Jené was in labor, the doctor repeated, “I know you’re worn-out. But you’ve got to push.” Only Jené’s body was tired. Her mind was busy, wandering out the window to the cityscape where she figured the doctor lived in a penthouse apartment with his longtime girlfriend, an actress. No, a gourmet chef in a restaurant with bottles of wine with names like Franciscan Oakville and Masi Amarone. The kind that writers took the time to describe in terms like woodsy and piquant. She wasn’t sure if anything she had ever eaten was piquant, but fresh grapefruit sprinkled with sugar would certainly come close. It was the only way she’d eat it when her mother handed her a grapefruit for breakfast as a child.

  Somewhere among the cityscape was a girl younger than Jené giving birth in a bathtub. The baby was just coming out and she couldn’t stop it. She had just come home from school and her parents were at work. Girls like her never seemed to do a good job getting rid of their babies after they were born. They’d wrap them up in a bath towel and leave them behind a bush in their own backyard or in the dumpster in the apartment complex. The next day their story would end up in the local section of the paper. Jené wasn’t sure why she’d come to the hospital. Done the right thing. And she was sure she could have hidden a baby better than the girls out there. So she tried not to think about it.

  She winced, and the doctor said, “You’re going to be all right. It won’t be much longer.”

  When the fair-skinned child, no longer than one of Jené’s sneakers was born, the nurse wiped her off and tried to hand her to Jené.

  “No, ma’am,” Jené said. “I don’t want her.”

  “You mean you don’t want to hold her,” the nurse said. “You’re just overwhelmed. I’ll bring her back once you’ve gotten some rest.”

  Jené fell asleep not long after the baby was born. She awoke to an empty room. Even though it was her first time in a hospital, she knew why a sofa was several feet from her bed. That was where her boyfriend or husband or mother or someone who cared could stay overnight. But she had broken up with Johnny when she was six months pregnant, and hadn’t heard from him since. He’d become hood rich from his kleptomania. His uncontrollable desire to steal and pawn had made him one of the wealthiest young men in the neighborhood. He had money in the bank and a stack of money in a cigar box in his sock drawer that he was only supposed to use for emergencies. But he didn’t always use it for emergencies, he used it to buy things that didn’t matter like value meals even though he was a vegetarian and specialty bookmarks with tassels and beads even though he never read. Jené wasn’t quite sure how she had gotten caught up with him, other than the fact that he had a lot of things to look at and play with, borrow, and her things were few in number.

  She had no desire to call her mother. She was probably lying beneath some man somewhere hoping to borrow money from her only daughter. But it wasn’t always like that. And it wasn’t her fault. She was like Johnny. She had a sickness. Her mother had a real job as a certified nursing assistant once in her life, but then her man left the year Jené turned 16. And then the people in the TV started talking to her. She was sure of it. After that, sometimes Jené would see her mother and sometimes she wouldn’t.

  Jené often wondered when it would be her turn, when her sickness would come. Her one extravagance was St. John’s Wort. She’d read a lot about its benefits. It was supposed to keep your mind right. Jené wanted something better for her life. But she didn’t know what exactly was better or how to get it, so she figured St. John’s Wort was a start. When the nurse returned, Jené was still staring at that empty sofa.

  “You ready to hold your baby?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  Someone had done a good job cleaning the baby who was swaddled in a pink blanket and had a tiny pink bow in her hair. Holding her reminded Jené of using sheets straight from the drier. She would wrap herself in their soft warmth and inhale pleasant scents like ocean breeze and mountain air. Scents in faraway places.

  “Do you have a name for her yet?” the nurse asked.

  “Just thought of one,” Jené said. “Tide.”

  “Eighteen years and I’ve never heard that one.”

  Jené was pleased she thought of a name nobody else had.

  A middle-aged woman with short brown hair took the empty seat next to Jené at the gate.

  “What a beautiful baby,” the woman said.

  “Thank you.”

  “That itty bitty baby’s going on an airplane ride?”

  “Uh, no…I, um, work here. I brought the baby to show my colleagues,” Jené rambled. “They were just so excited. They threw me a baby shower and everything a while back.”

  “Well, isn’t that special.”

  The baby started her soft wail again. Jené rolled her eyes and gently rocked.

  “You know that baby looks just like you.”

  Jené didn’t see how that was a good thing. She wore her short hair in a tiny ponytail every day. She was never fond of her dark skin, which seemed to be an easy target for tormentors in her grade school days. Black tire. Black shoe. Black night. They would call her anything they could think of. She was glad the baby had turned out fair-skinned like her father. She hoped that was the only trait of his that Tide would have.

  “So are you going to be here a while?” the woman asked.

  “I imagine so,” Jené said.

  “Would you mind watching my stuff while I run to the bathroom?”

  “Okay.”

  The woman left behind a floral tote bag and a small black suitcase. Jené was glad she was gone. She needed to get back to thinking. Calling her ex-boyfriend
came to mind. He was the baby’s father after all. Jené could demand that he help pay for childcare, but she figured that was pointless. She wished she could just hop on one of these planes and fly away. People certainly got away with crazier things on a plane. Not a week ago, the paper had reported a man who had smuggled a hot plate on his flight and cooked himself a grilled cheese sandwich. The in-flight snacks just didn’t agree with him he told the paper.

  Five minutes had passed and the brown-haired woman had not returned. Jené wondered what was in her floral tote bag, which seemed to be the latest trend. It was nice and deep, like a diaper bag. Jené looked toward the bathroom and saw a line of women forming outside the door. She flung the floral tote over her shoulder and began walking down the concourse. Despite her soreness, she moved quickly as if she was hurrying to catch a flight. She wiped her sweaty palms on Tide’s blanket as she exited the airport and waited at the bus stop. She sat in the middle of the bus and thought of the lady with the floral bag.

  Was she a mother? A frequent flyer? Did she really think Tide was pretty? Jené didn’t know what possessed her to take the bag. She had never stolen before. It could certainly hold diapers, but she could have purchased a cheap diaper bag in fairly good condition from Goodwill. Jené thought that maybe she should have put Tide in that tote and left her in the airport. Maybe that lady would have taken her to some perfect life in Chicago. She seemed nice enough and looked like a schoolteacher or soccer mom in her high-waist jeans and bright sweater.

  Jené nearly fell onto her purple futon when she got home. Her legs were tired of walking and her mind was tired of thinking. She tossed the floral tote onto the floor. Tide started crying again, and Jené banged her fist against the coffee table.

  She changed her baby’s soiled diaper, gave her a bottle, and laid her on the twin-size bed in the apartment’s only bedroom. She arranged pillows around Tide in case she rolled during the night. She hadn’t decided whether to buy a crib.