Around eight o'clock, Johnnie Mae came to the back door oi the St. Pierres' house and looked through the kitchen window at her mother. Mama was sitting at the table with her arms folded across her chest and her face as tight as Dick's hatband. The family had been waiting for her and Papa had sent Johnnie Mae to see if there was trouble.
At the sight oi Johnnie Mae, Alice rose from the table, signaled to the girl to wait, and marched into the dining room. Alexis sat alone at the table, staring at the place settings. Alice quietly informed Alexis that she had put up the food and was going home. Alexis said nothing, but tears ran down her cheeks. She sat at the table looking at the chair her husband was accustomed to sit in and continued crying. He was not there, but she looked as if she were hanging on to every word that came from the empty chair.
Alice left the St. Pierre house feeling angry. When she'd gone a block she thought to be ashamed oi herself. She was mad at Alexis—and Douglas—but she hadn't stopped to feel sorry for Alexis crying into her sleeve like that. He'd made her cry. He'd fussed at her and lied to her most likely and done something that caused her to cry and Alice was only feeling sorry now that she'd left their house. Up underneath them in
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the house, her compassion was squashed by annoyance with them, and this annoyance had crowded out her better feelings.
Wintertime brings a closed-in feeling that creates hazards and annoyances. Households draw in toward their centers for warmth in cold weather, and emotions and conflicts that are dispersed in balmier air keep circulating and threatening to strangle folks when they're inside so long huddled against the cold. In the house with them, Alice hadn't given Alexis as much sympathy as you'd give a dog. But out in the sharp air she could hear the woman sobbing and wished she'd given her some show of feeling.
Alice walked down Wisconsin Avenue feeling grateful that Willie had sent Johnnie Mae to see about her. She had a feeling that she wanted to gather up her loved ones and crush them to her. Then her mind went to Clara—the fact of her being gone. And a twinge passed over her. Alice's thoughts raced ahead to the coming child and she wondered if every joyful thought would now be diminished a jot by longing for Clara.
Johnnie Mae skipped down the street ahead of her mother. When Alice caught up with her at the street corner, Johnnie Mae was staring into the large pit that was the construction site of the new Francis Junior High School swimming pool. Johnnie Mae stood under a streetlight with a dreamy look on her face.
After much agitation on the part of Reverend Jenkins of Mount Zion Church and Reverend Souter from the First Baptist church and Reverend Walker from Jerusalem Baptist and Dr. Tyler and Miss Elizabeth Boston and Miss Clementine Chichester and others, the District of Columbia had finally
agreed to build a regulation swimming pool for colored children in Georgetown. The churchmen had organized the most prominent o( Georgetown's colored people to press the district government and the Congress to recognize that colored citizens were paying taxes. And being taxpayers, they were entitled to recreational facilities and libraries for their children. The leaders cited business after business in Georgetown owned by colored citizens who paid their taxes as certainly as their white neighbors. Hundreds of signatures were gathered on the petitions, and the pastors made the rounds oi countless meetings.
Building the Francis Junior High School swimming pool was a compromise, though. The government was immovable and the white citizens were adamant that the same playgrounds, pools, and libraries not be used by both colored and white. And as long as there was something for even-body, nobody could squawk. Though there was something like progress about the pool, there was something else, too. They had built a pool for the colored children. Colored weren't allowed into the whites-only pool on Volta Place and never would be — that was final.
The swimming pool had become the biggest topic ot conversation in Georgetown. People wrote to their people back home about it. Little as it was, the colored folks had got something for themselves.
To Alice Bynum the new swimming pool was tangible proof that their opportunities were better in Georgetown. "As long as we're making progress," she said to herself, "no matter how slow. As long as we're not standing stock-still with our shoes in the mud!"
An odd thought came to her as she stood back a bit watching Johnnie Mae. She tried to think back to when she'd begun thinking of progress and better times and accomplishments as something for Johnnie Mae rather than for herself. After all, she was not an old woman. But comes a time for a woman when she stops thinking of herself as a girl, as a person of possibles. She starts looking at the plain facts of herself. Her body that's become the body that she has and her habits becoming the habits that she's written in stone. Her "haves" being the ones she's got and maybe not getting any more. Alice knew she was still able to work hard, was still a clear thinker, was still pretty enough. But there had recently come about a transference. She had come to a kind of resignation that real progress was not going to come in time for her to really latch on to it. Johnnie Mae would get it. Johnnie Mae would be coming around just in time for the brass ring. And what there was chiefly for Alice and Willie to do was to make sure Johnnie Mae was ready. They would prepare her — be sure she'd be able to reach for it. Johnnie Mae must be able to finish school, must go all the way through. Maybe she'd go on after high school to a college? Maybe she would find work as a teacher or a nurse? Alice's dreams took on an ever-rising spiral.
Johnnie Mae would perhaps be a schoolteacher and a big woman like Miss Nannie Helen Burroughs or Miss Mary Macleod Bethune or some other Negro women. That's why Alice and Willie worked—why they'd come to Georgetown. And now there was the baby to dream for. And they needed to keep their children from being ground down by want so much that they wouldn't be able to dream dreams for themselves. She and Willie could have filled their bellies and shod
their feet in Carolina, but for schooling and dreaming their children were better off here. Yes, it had happened. She had ceded the future to her children.
Johnnie Mae's dreams fetched closer to hand. She had been watching and waiting for the swimming pool to be completed. Each day since the work had begun, she'd looked down into the hole that was fast becoming a trench that would eventually be lined with tiles and by June would be filled with water. Nobody was more excited about the new pool than Johnnie Mae and nobody more eager to jump in.
"Come on" was what Johnnie Mae said to Pearl that afternoon after classes let out. It was a January day with bright sunshine and soft clouds. The phrase that had always rallied Clara to her cause, whatever it might be, had the same effect on Pearl. At first she'd just stood there. Johnnie Mae walked away a few steps, looked back at Pearl still standing on the steps oi Wormley School, raised her eyebrows in a way that questioned the girl's moxie, and walked down Prospect Street. Pearl followed. Johnnie Mae was right to call Pearl a scaredy-cat. She was scared a lot oi the time. Since the Millers' troubles out in Oklahoma, Pearl had started to be skittish and to shrink away from people. But she couldn't stop herself from following Johnnie Mae either. Johnnie Mae had said come on and she couldn't disengage herself from the pull of the girl and make any kind oi firm decision to stay put. So she followed along.
The blessed freedom of walking in and around the clusters of people buying or selling or toting a load buoyed the girls.
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"Step on a crack, break your mother's back!" Johnnie Mae looked like a ballerina or an aerialist walking from cobblestone to cobblestone not stepping on the cracks, placing her feet on one rounded stone then another. She held her arms out away from her sides to balance and Pearl tried vainly to copy her.
Johnnie Mae scuttled away from the crowds of folks on Wisconsin Avenue and wound her way up and around and through alleys. She went past Stevens's fish market in order to see Pearl's eyes pop. She knew that the sight of the huge swordtail hanging in the window would make Pearl gape like Clara used to. They took the alley
behind the fish market and down toward Water Street. A group of men with bloody aprons sat on crates gutting fish. "Watch out!" Johnnie Mae called to Pearl, not stopping, only skirting the men. Pails of waste water cascaded out of doorways all along the street, running over the cobblestones and sluicing toward the river. Johnnie Mae followed beside this septic freshet to the nasty tangle of wild growth and human waste at the river's edge.
They followed along a pathway that was merely a ribbon of bare ground pounded out by numerous feet. Pearl got winded and was breathing out of her mouth like Clara used to. Once, Johnnie Mae pulled up and turned around to face her with arms akimbo and chest stuck out. Pearl bumped smack into her because she had had her eyes on the ground. Pearl took the blow and stopped and looked at Johnnie Mae with alarm. Johnnie Mae didn't say anything, only stomped her foot. Pearl wondered if this meant she was to turn around and go back. But when Johnnie Mae resumed walking, she continued, too.
The path was filled with mud puddles and rocks of all sizes. Some of the rocks were sharp-edged and some smooth and slippery. Every kind of stick and board with splinters was calling "Step on me, I dare you!" And some whipsaw shrubs lashed their ankles. Despite the cold and the even chillier breeze blowing in off the water, Johnnie Mae peeled open her coat, perspiring with the exertion of cutting through debris. Pearl, struggling mightily to keep up the pace, was nevertheless chilled to the bone. She held together the place at the waist of her coat where a missing button left her abdomen exposed, and her gloveless right hand developed a white crust. She lubricated her lips with saliva in the face of the river wind lashing them and the wind quickly seized this moisture and dried her lips still more. By the time they reached the end of Water Street and continued down under the Francis Scott Key Bridge, both their faces were tight and ashy.
The brambles became ever wilder as they continued westward. The two, with Johnnie Mae leading, sidled past the Washington Canoe Club, a cozy clapboard structure perched on the riverbank with a fancy dock attached and stacks o{ canoes on two sides, members only and no trespassing signs sprouted here and there on the periphery of the club's property, and an irascible hound patrolled the fence to keep the hoi polloi to the public side of the path.
"That's the Three Sisters—those rocks out there—that's the top of their castle. That's where Clara is. But you know that 'cause that's where you came up from." Johnnie Mae pronounced all this as if there could be no doubt as to its veracity. People in Georgetown had always spoken of the Three Sisters as if it were both an identifiable trio of female spirits and a
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place in space and time. It was there and it was them. It was near and yet not at all near to the bank. All that was between the three boulders and the shoreline on either side for a span of perhaps a mile was the mysterious bailiwick of the female spirits who inhabited the Potomac.
Pearl had never been so close to the edge of the river. She could never have imagined herself at a point so close to the boulders. She shook her head briskly as if she meant to dislodge her confusion and struggled to figure out why Johnnie Mae was so convinced that she was a part of her sister's drowning. How in the world had she gotten hold of this idea?
Suddenly, Johnnie Mae ran up the embankment away from the river, turned on her heels, and ran fast back down to-ward the river's edge. Pearl expected that she would stop at the lip of the river, that this was some version of a game of whirligig. But Johnnie Mae continued into the river up to her waist, soaking her shoes and socks and most of her clothing.
Pearl backed away from this spectacle, afraid that she would be pulled into the frigid water by Johnnie Mae or by some force at work to grab young girls. For the first time she started to believe that some power could be at work around the banks of the Potomac. She wanted to beg Johnnie Mae to come out of the water, to just come out and let them go on home and never come back down here. But she didn't know how to get it said. Often she got plain disgusted with herself for not being able to say out loud what was struggling to get said. It was at these moments — and there were so many of them in a day — that she would shake her head from side to side. So many moments required this head-clearing motion that it was fast becoming a mannerism of the girl. She blurted
out, "You pushed your sister in the river! You're mean and you didn't love her and you pushed her down in the river and made her drown."
The words stopped Johnnie Mae's whirling. This was the most she had ever heard Pearl Miller utter. And this string of words was nothing less than a quiver of arrows fired straight at her. This was the test of her theory that Pearl Miller was in some way Clara come again. Because if Pearl Miller knew what actually happened, if she knew things about the events at the riverbank, then it was certain proof that she was some sort of haint.
The trouble was that Johnnie Mae herself hardly knew what had happened. The girls were swimming, cannonading, swimming in circles around each other. Johnnie Mae was pearhdiving. Clara was sitting on the back end of a log and there was a big splash and Johnnie Mae thought it was her own body slicing the water. But it had been Rat. Rat had hit the water with a big splash. Rat and the log—and Rat had never come up again. And she never saw her again—never saw Rat alive again.
She had bobbed up to the surface of the water and didn't see Clara. Clara sitting on the log on the bank was a marker— a place on the shore that placed the swimmers, that showed where they were in the water. Then Clara was gone from the log. Johnnie Mae looked and counted the other heads above the surface of the water. They were all there giggling and laughing, but not Clara. Johnnie Mae dove down below. She opened her eyes to see beneath the water. Everything was green and cloudy. She couldn't see a thing beneath the surface. She came back for air. She sucked in air and dove back down. Her chest was on fire. She couldn't see Clara when she
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came back to the surface. She saw the white ribbon that was on Clara's plait — that she had tied to Clara's plait. She thought momentarily to be angry that the white ribbon was off the plait and floating and going green in the slimy water when it should have been fastened to Clara's hair. She went down again and forgot to close her mouth. Water came in her throat and through her nose.
She duck-dived to retrieve Rat, but Rat never came back to the surface until she was dragged up bv the men from the city. Johnnie Mae hadn't actually seen it, oi course. She hadn't even been told about this. Her mama and papa hadn't thought it was appropriate to tell her how Clara's body had come up out of the river and been prepared for burial. Snow Simpson—his skin was dark and glossy like a ripe eggplant— was mad about being always called Snow. One day — for meanness, because Johnnie Mae had not let him have one of her pencils — Snow Simpson had told her all about the men pulling Clara from the Potomac. He sidled up to her ear in the school yard and said that the men from the city had come up and stood around and had dragged lines in the water and had finally snagged Clara like a big old carp and hooked her and reeled her in and started to throw her back tor being too small. This last he'd said over his shoulder, gliding past smirking. And Johnnie Mae had hit him in the back so hard the bones in his back stung her hand.
At the river now, the cool water coursed through her legs, sloshing her labia, chilling them and causing a shiver. Warm urine let go and streamed down and warmed the labia. The cool water was less cool, then cooler again. The coolness called her back to herself and the freezing cold water slapped her out of her reverie. She barreled out of the river. Out oi the
water, the freezing water seemed to burn her skin. Mad at herself for peeing on herself like a baby, she ran up the embankment to Pearl and pushed the girl's chest.
"I didn't. I didn't push nobody. I didn't push Rat." "You musta pushed her like you're pushing me!" Pearl Miller heard a girl yelling and could feel her heart in her rib cage fluttering. Standing toe to toe with Johnnie Mae she had a sensation of floating. She could hear a lot of angry talking and she could see that Johnnie Mae's
lips had ceased to move and so she concluded that the girl yelling into Johnnie Mae's face must be herself. She felt a thing taking hold of her, trapped as she was with the river ahead of her and her feet mired in all kinds of debris on the riverbank. And Georgetown was up the slope and people were walking by on their own business and not many o( them even noticed her. And Johnnie Mae, the only person who seemed to take a notice of her, was badgering her about being a haint and seeming to threaten her with drowning. Was Johnnie Mae pulling her out to the Three Sisters, offering her in exchange for Clara? Or maybe she was just working in concert with these mystery forces in the river that wanted to pull down somebody foolish enough to come out here—someone who could never match her curiosity with enough courage to take any daring action. "I didn't push Rat!" Johnnie Mae said it loud. She said it hard. She was telling herself more than she was telling anybody. Her soul was leaping with happiness that someone had challenged her on the point. Somebody was so mad — so involved with this tangle — that they'd confronted her and asked her if she was responsible. And now she could insist and hear herself say it. "No." She had not pushed her sister. She did not drown her
sister. She did riot even realize until too late that she had lapsed in her caring for her sister and let the Three Sisters, the Potomac, or whomever take her away.
There was her mother, herself, and her baby sister. And on a day when she had the care of her sister, a day when she chewed down on her mother's responsibilities, she had failed. She'd been trusted as she'd always been trusted—with Clara. She had failed. She had been a little mother countless times. It was her duty.
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