bailiwick. Here she was the boss. And no other person — no daughter or sister or cousin or man—could cut her hair in this precinct. She determined the measures and the portions. She was the chooser. She gave the most succulent piece of chicken to the husband or the child, determining which piece of the meat which person got.
Willie, because he liked the leg and thigh, got the fat plump pieces rather than the other ones ever so slightly drier because they had stayed in the pan too long. The driest pieces Alice put aside for herself out of the widely held notion that the cook accepted responsibility for all mistakes. She was the one who gave Johnnie Mae the breast that was the size she could eat, rather than the one slightly larger that would turn off her appetite. Cracking the wing pieces apart and separating them for Clara because Clara hated to rip them apart but loved — loved only—the tender, sweet wing meat. She carried the portions and preferences in her head and as strict as it sometimes was, it was also thrilling control. She said which and how much for them and for herself and always retained the power to give herself less. She, the loving, dutiful mother, could account for every meal her two children had eaten and every meal her husband had had since he married her. And the limits of her energy and the skill and resourcefulness and cleverness oi her buying and cooking for them—and for Alexis and Douglas St. Pierre — determined how they would be fed.
"Take those clothes off and lie down a few minutes. I'll call you when dinner's ready," Mama said, for she could see that Johnnie Mae was more worn out than hungry. A little nap would give her a second wind.
Papa sat listening to the radio with his ear up close and his face turned away from the women as they crisscrossed the room putting dishes on the tahle. He'd done his part by setting up the table in the front room, and now he was sulking about the late dinner. The last few days he'd argued that their working for the St. Pierres on Thanksgiving Day made a comment about him that he didn't like. People would think he didn't give a thing to keep his family, that his wife and daughter had to work on Thanksgiving Day—cooking in someone else's kitchen. A family woman, a woman with a husband and children, should be able to pass up a day's work on Thanksgiving Day. On a day like that a woman ought to be in her own kitchen.
Alice had answered him again and again that she was doing it as much as a favor as anything else. Douglas St. Pierre was having his important friend from Harvard College and Miz St. Pierre couldn't take a chance on hiring out a stranger. Alexis had appealed to her like a friend or neighbor.
That part galled Willie. Alice was letting Alexis St. Pierre put a claim on her for friendship.
A whiff of Clara's fragrance—a sweet yeastiness—struck Alice like a glimpse of the girl as she walked the candied sweets to the table. Their color was the color Clara's stomach had been early on when Alice had wrapped her.
All the day's smells had been so bounteous. Since early— since just at sunrise—Johnnie Mae had been inhaling the odors of cooking food. The richness and the complex mingling of sweets and sours and pungents had been absorbed under her skin. Now the food heaped on her plate made her feel like gagging.
"You eatin' your dinner, Johnnie?" her father said in his plaintive inquisitiveness. "All this food and nobody got an appetite."
"What're you talkin' about, Willie? We eatin' as hard as we can," Ina said.
"Johnnie Mae is just peckin'. She must've ate up at Miz St. Pierre."
"We didn't eat up at Miz St. Pierre," Mama said, rolling a swallow of water in her mouth. "We saved ourselves to eat dinner at home."
"Couldn't work all day and not eat. Sittin' on the side in the white folks' kitchen like a backyard chile. This girl ain't no backyard chile. This chile ain't no backyard chile. I'm raisin' her. I'm feedin' her, ain't I?"
"I wanted us all to eat together," Mama said quietly, trying to deflect a fuss.
"Now what you hollerin' about, man? This is Thanksgiving. We all sittin' here together eatin' our dinner. What you hollerin' about?" Ina said.
"Alice, you raisin' this chile like you dohV it alone. I got somethin' to say about workin' in the woman's kitchen on a holiday. If she care about her husband's friend, why can't she cook her own dinner?"
"Now, Willie, you know Miz St. Pierre can't manage a big dinner for people." Alice answered him sweetly, hoping to edge him away from his annoyance.
"Why she can't? Why she can't do it?"
"Oh, don't talk silly. You know they don't know a thing about working hard enough to do all that," Ina countered.
"All she knows is to wring as much out of a colored woman as she can."
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"Aw, don't let it worry you and spoil your dinner. She'll pay for her easy life. There'll he less heaven tor her, that's all. And she'll be sorry she spent this short lifetime without toiling when she sees the half measure she's gonna get in heaven. I intend to be there with my feet up and my head on a downy pillow, much work as I've done in this life, and you, too." Ina averted the strife handily, and all of them finished the dinner laughing and easy.
Still somewhat reticent with adults, Pearl was not in January the scared rabbit she had been in September. She walked briskly out of the classroom and threaded her way into the crowded hall before Johnnie Mae could catch up to her. For the first time that Johnnie Mae could recall, Pearl Miller was walking purposefully ahead instead of measling along behind her or standing still. What kind of bug did she have in her drawers? Johnnie Mae noticed that Pearl's eyes were now on level with hers. She was holding her chin up and not ducking her head. Pearl Miller seemed to have developed a new, curvy body. The knobs on Pearl's chest had blossomed and she now wore a brassiere. Pearl Miller was becoming a new person!
Johnnie Mae's breasts were still little more than nubbins, but they had become more noticeable. Neither her mother nor her aunt Ina had discussed it with her, but they'd decided between them that Ina must now get to work on a brassiere for Johnnie Mae. It was no longer appropriate for her to be going around wearing undershirts like a boy or a baby child,
her nubbins bobbing around for any to see. She was coming on to be a woman.
Mama said that everybody matures at her own pace and even- girl gets her monthly and develops a bosom. It's just a matter ot time. Mama was brusque in her way oi talking about these "woman" things. According to her, some subjects aren't worthy of a whole lot oi ruminating. The things that make a woman a woman didn't bear much conversation. Only a slattern would till her days running off at the mouth about what's up underneath people's clothes. A decent woman had too many other things to do with her time. All she said that morning before school was that Aunt Ina had something for her to try on. So Johnnie Mae must come home right after school let out.
The thing was simply made of white cotton and delicate eyelet lace on the straps and cups. It was small, and even with it on, her breasts made hardly a ripple on her blouse. Aunt Ina saw the bit of disappointment on Johnnie Mae's face when she looked at herself. "Just give it time," Aunt Ina said. "Don't try to hum' up to be a woman. You're going to have to be one for the rest of your life."
To Johnnie Mae, time seemed to be having its own sweet wav with her. Here was Pearl Miller, who used to be a sack of potatoes and a scared rabbit to boot, now looking like a grown woman! And her chest still looked like a boy's!
Johnnie Mae came straight through to the kitchen. Mama stood at the stove with her back to it. Johnnie Mae stared at her mama's stomach. She saw the rounding and couldn't
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believe how foolish she'd been not to have seen it sooner. How could she not have noticed something so obvious? Her own mother, someone she saw every day, looked unfamiliar. Mama's face was puffy along the cheeks and her waist was completely gone. Now that Pearl had pointed it out she could see it clearly.
Pearl had said matter-of-factly, "Your mama's having a baby, isn't she?" Johnnie Mae had been struck dumb at the idea. No one had told her a thing. Now 7 she put her hand tentatively on her mothe
r's stomach. The belly was thick and tight. She was shocked, not only at the obvious swelling there but that her mother allowed her to touch it. Johnnie Mae took her hand off, backed to the other side o( the table, and looked at her mother's stomach from across the room. Mama seemed to her to be standing way far off on the other side of a valley. She was visible, but removed a distance from Johnnie Mae. Mama's words, too, seemed to be straining across a chasm. "I'm going to have a baby, Johnnie Mae."
Johnnie Mae looked at her mother's face then quickly down at the floor. "Don't act a baby, Johnnie," her mother said. "You're a woman yourself nearly. It's natural for us to bring another child. It'll add to our joy." Mama's words were strange — not unintelligible, just unfamiliar. Yet there was a familiarity. The conversation had gone like so many of their talks. Mama said Johnnie Mae was a woman, but she spoke to her, as always, as if she were a child. Despite her mother's smooth, calm delivery, there was an undercurrent to her words. Was Mama frightened? If it was the state of natural circumstance for a woman to be in the family way then why was she trembling a bit, sucking in her bottom lip?
When Papa came into the kitchen, Johnnie Mae and her
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mother were on separate sides of the room. Again there was a shift, a realignment of the tectonic plates of the family ground. The earth beneath them was shifting and they would be moved by it as they'd been moved by the death of Clara. They would be a different grouping with a new baby. Would it be a boy? They always say a man wants a boy. How would Papa feel about her after he'd gotten his boy?
Johnnie Mae wanted desperately to be grown-up. She wanted to have a glorious bosom and the calm, smug womanliness that everybody said would come to her one day. But she was scared that even though she wanted to move away from these people, this new baby might knock her completely out of their lives.
H
"Never take advice; can't keep still all day, and not being a pussy-cat, I don't like to doze by the fire. I like adventures, and I am going to find some." Johnnie Mae began chapter five of Little Women with her elbows flat, her shoulders hunched, and her chin resting on the kitchen table. Dinner and dishes were over and the family — Mama, Papa, Aunt Ina, and Johnnie Mae—were sharing each other's breaths in the kitchen before bedtime. The women passed the time sewing up holes in socks. Papa sat back in his chair, working a toothpick in his teeth.
Wormley School had few books other than the hand-me-down texts given to the colored schools by the school board. Miss Clementine Chichester, the librarian at the Mount Zion Church community center, had highly recommended Little Women to Johnnie Mae. Miss Chichester, a college-educated woman who did laundry work for very rich families, took it as her mission to disabuse colored people o{ the notion that the only fit book for them and their children to read was the Bible. Georgetown's alley residents were her biggest con-
stituency and she considered it her calling to promote health, hygiene, and education in those precincts. A cadger and an irrepressible social reformer, Miss Chichester visited the homes of wealthy Georgetowners on her laundry rounds and hauled off any unwanted books to build up the center's lending library.
Miss Chichester was impressed with Johnnie Mae's reading ability and urged her to borrow a copy of Little Women, with the caveat that the book must not be put down in a pan o{ gravy, that her hands must be washed before opening it, and that Towser must not be allowed to chew on it. She praised it, promised Johnnie Mae that she would enjoy it, and that, upon her signature in the record book, it could be kept for a full two weeks.
Alice's and Ina's talk around the stove was full of the doings and goings-on of Miz St. Pierre and Miz Mary Ann Clarke. Johnnie Mae drew down into the book and let their voices play above her head. She fancied herself like Jo, a girl with too much moxie to sit around chattering about other people's business.
When folks talk about a person talking up a blue streak they usually mean somebody like Miss Mary Ann Clarke. Ina's best customer, she was a tall, angular woman who talked constantly while having her fittings in the front parlor. Miss Mary Ann Clarke talked so hard and fast that she hardly seemed to be breathing. The stream of words flowed endlessly outward. Never mind if someone thought to answer her. Answering wasn't at all necessary when Miss Mary Ann Clarke talked.
Ina told Alice what Miss Mary Ann Clarke had said about the St. Pierres being in financial trouble. Earlier that afternoon, Ina had cleared her throat and drawn her lips tighter
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around the row of straight pins in her mouth as she pinned the hem o( Miss Mary Ann Clarke's new black serge skirt. Seated on a small hassock, she'd removed each pin from her lips, slid it into the fabric, and leaned back to get perspective on the work. Miss Mary Ann Clarke stood on a slightly taller hassock. Ina's front parlor floor was an obstacle course of hassocks. The four square wooden stools with legs at graduated heights and plush upholstered centers like nougats were used for measuring and pinning customers' hems. Cap had made the stools and Ina had fitted them with cushions at around the time she decided to put a seamstress sign in her front window on Volta Place.
"My sister said that woman, Alexis St. Pierre, has been taking her family silver service down to the Jews on M Street," Miss Mary Ann Clarke said. "They say her husband is tied up in some bad business about money down at the agency where he works. My sister says he has run through all their money. How come you don't take in laundry, Ina Mae? You could make a pretty penny if you did laundry and pressing along with your sewing. As it is, I've got to send my things down to the Chinaman on Water Street."
Ina's mind had wandered and she was sorry she hadn't caught more of what Miss Mary Ann Clarke was saying about the St. Pierres. But a body would lose her mind if she tried to keep up listening to this talkative woman. Removing the last of the straight pins from her mouth, Ina had replied, "Miss Mary Ann Clarke, you know I don't do laundry. I never have. That about the length you want it now?"
Glancing in the mirror, Miss Mary Ann Clarke had answered, "Yes, Ina Mae, that will probably do. If a decent
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woman like you took in some laundry, we wouldn't have to deal with Chinamen."
Always prepared to sew, Ina now pulled another sock with a hole at the heel from her running bag. She took a needle from the place above her heart where several threaded needles were worked through the dress and set to work on the sock.
According to Alice, Alexis St. Pierre had been acting nervous lately. She seemed especially nervous when her husband was at home. It was as if she were guarding herself against saying something to him. For his part, Douglas St. Pierre appeared to be avoiding his wife. When both were in the house, there was little conversation. And the only time there was lively talk now was when Douglas St. Pierre entertained his acquaintances. Alexis was fluttery and irritable on these occasions and became increasingly so as the talk turned to investments and speculation in the stock market. Douglas became downright giddy then and took a child's delight in tales of wild speculation on the stock market. Alexis would look at him with a dull, puzzled face and refuse to join in the gaiety.
As a senior clerk at the department of the treasury, Douglas St. Pierre afforded a comfortable, though not opulent, lifestyle. The backbone of the St. Pierres' financial position was Alexis's inheritance.
When the women's talk wound down, Willie rose, stretched, and went out to the toilet for his evening constitutional. Johnnie Mae closed her book and hurried to wash up near the kitchen stove before going upstairs to her chilly bedroom.
At the St. Pierres' house the next day, Alice counted
Alexis's silver pieces and found many missing. Miss Mary Ann Clarke was right. They had been selling off their belongings. This was coming at a bad time—with the baby coming. Alice had wanted to work right up until the baby came and then have Ina work in her place until she could take her job back. But if the St. Pierres' money was getting tight, then soon they wouldn't be able to af
ford to keep her on. Better be asking people if they've heard of anything.
Alice ruminated on the St. Pierres and their financial troubles while she worked. All she was going to learn she'd have to learn at the keyhole. Though they'd had a respectful camaraderie over the years, Alice knew that Alexis wouldn't discuss her troubles. Alexis would consider it unseemly to talk about these troubles straight out and honestly.
Around the time that dinner was ready and Alice prepared to serve it, she heard Alexis and Douglas arguing in the parlor. When they moved into the dining room, she could hear their conversation clearly from the kitchen. She was embarrassed for them at first. Then she got angry that they were not ashamed to air all their business within earshot. She listened quietly, seated at the kitchen table with her hands folded as if praying. Douglas St. Pierre spoke to his wife in a low, sullen, growling voice. Alexis's voice danced above his in a tearful, high-pitched whine. "How can they do that? How can they do it? Douglas, how can this happen?" Alexis's words were clearly intelligible. Alice was unable to discern Douglas's reply. She could only hear his growl.
Alice decided not to go into the room. There wouldn't be any way to pretend that she wasn't aware of their argument. The sound of a door slamming followed. Alice waited impa-
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nentlv in the kitchen. The argument seemed to have run out with the slamming door. The next noise from the room was Alexis's crying. Alice was in a tangle about what to do. She wanted to get the dinner served and get home. But she was reluctant to go into the room. Her annoyance grew into anger while she waited the dinner. She fussed to herself that she had better be looking for something else if they were going to start acting like this. She didn't want foolishness.
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