Tomorrow's Bread

by Anna Jean Mayhew

  He comes in the kitchen fast, reads it. “Mess myself?”

  “She wet Hawk’s bed. That’s what she means.” I fold the paper over and over. “The police won’t do anything till at least tomorrow. Oh, Lord.”

  “I’m calling Pastor Polk.”

  “Yes.”

  I go to the living room, sit down next to Hawk. The radio is playing a song I like. I listen to it, telling myself, she loves me, yeah, yeah, yeah.

  Uncle Ray calls from the kitchen. “Pastor is going to get folks out to look for Livvie. I called Ben Stone, too. The macaroni’s done.”

  * * *

  Georgeanne Wilkins knocks on the front door as Hawk and I are finishing supper. “Eben Polk called me,” she say, pulling off her boots. “My car was skidding all over.” Her Buick is parked on the street.

  Right behind Miss Wilkins is Hildie Stone, carrying pies in cardboard boxes. “One apple, one peach. They’re real good, warmed up.” She sticks the pies in the oven and pulls out a chair at the kitchen table. “Ben, the pastor, half a dozen men from the church are out talking to people, walking the streets.”

  The wind is howling, not at all the quiet snow we usually get.

  Another knock at the door, and there’s Veola Whitin, carrying a big pot of soup, Desmond behind her with a platter of cornbread. “Boyce is out with the men, and nothing would do but Desmond come over to be with Hawk. Y’all heard anything yet?”

  I am glad to see Desmond. This is a hard night for Hawk. “Hey, Desmond.” I give him a hug. “He’s in the living room.” Desmond runs from the kitchen.

  Veola puts the soup pot on the stove. “Vegetable beef. Enough here for a couple of meals.” We sit at the table with Mrs. Stone, and Miss Wilkins joins us. Here she is, caught in a snowstorm, and dressed uptown like. Necklace, earrings, a silk scarf at her neck. She ask, “When did you see Livinia last?”

  I feel tears coming on. “I found her sleeping in Hawk’s bed about three. When Uncle Ray and Hawk came home an hour later she was gone.”

  “How could she have left the house while you were here?”

  I’ve been dreading that question. “I went out front to watch the snow, check the thermometer. She must have left by the kitchen door before I came back in.” My legs shake against the table.

  Mrs. Stone say, “You’ve had a time taking care of her. I know how bad her memory is.”

  The four of us sit while the wall clock ticks. Hildie tells us about a new magazine rack in the grocery store, and Miss Wilkins say she’s got a student disrupting her classes. Veola and Boyce like Third Ward, but Desmond misses Hawk a lot. We talk about everything but the sleet clicking on the windows.

  It’s after ten when Uncle Ray comes through the front door, shivering, rubbing his hands, Preacher, Mr. Stone, and Boyce Whitin behind him. The icy air comes in with them. Mr. Stone looks at his wife, shaking his head.

  They stamp their feet, brush snow from their coats.

  Uncle Ray pulls off his hat. “We’ve been all over, got people on the lookout. Went up and down Plum and Long. She couldn’t have gotten more than a couple of blocks, bad as it is out there, but we went all the way to Myers Street School, checked the tunnel, too.”

  “We’re not giving up,” Pastor Polk say. “We just needed to get warm, have something to eat, before we go back out.” His nose is red, his eyes are lined with wrinkles, more gray in his hair than I’ve noticed before, but having him in our kitchen makes me feel better. He hasn’t given up on Bibi.

  Uncle Ray sits at the table. “We’re gon check Watts and Morrow when we go back out, all the way to what’s burned, then down by the creek.”

  I feel weak, thinking about Bibi slipping into Little Sugar.

  Mr. Stone holds his hands in front of the stove. “Had to put chains on my tires. Streets are slick.”

  Mrs. Stone gets up. “There’s macaroni and cheese, collards, a couple of pies. Veola brought soup and cornbread.”

  “Sounds good, thanks.” Pastor sits at the table in his heavy coat.

  I dish out some macaroni but I’m shaking so bad I spill it.

  Uncle Ray takes the plate and spoon, puts them on the table, holds me close. I can smell the cold on him. Pastor gets up and puts his arms around both of us. “The Lord is with you. He is with Livinia, your Bibi.”

  * * *

  At five in the morning Uncle Ray comes back. I’m in bed, finally. Hawk and Desmond are in Hawk’s bed across the room, not knowing all that’s happened during the night. Veola went to a neighbor’s house, but let Desmond stay here. Miss Wilkins is on the sofa in the living room, Mrs. Stone’s in Bibi’s bed. I’m not asleep but I’m not awake, either. I’m seeing Bibi in my mind, wandering around in her nightgown, confused, asking me how to get home, saying she wants some breakfast, telling me—Uncle Ray touching my shoulder brings me back.

  “We found her. She’s alive.” He sits on the edge of my bed. “A couple of hours ago. In the tunnel, glad we checked it again. Somebody had covered her with newspapers and cardboard. Lots of homeless in there, especially on such a night.” He straightens, puts his hand on the small of his back, stretching. “We put her in Ben’s car, didn’t wait for an ambulance. Took her to Good Samaritan. They got her warmed up, but she hasn’t come to yet. . . .”

  “She going to die?”

  His voice is weak. “Doctor said exposure, hypothermia, frostbite, things like that. She’s got no fight left in her.”

  I can’t imagine Bibi not fighting anymore.

  “Pastor called the police to tell them about the other people sleeping in that tunnel, and he say they know. They know and not doing a thing.”

  Hawk rolls over, mumbles. “Did Bibi come home?” Desmond sits up beside him, rubbing his eyes.

  Uncle Ray goes to Hawk. “We took her to the hospital to get her warm. Folks there are taking care of her.”

  Hawk sits up, leans against Uncle Ray, his voice muffled. “When will she come home?”

  “Soon as she’s better.”

  The power fails while we making breakfast, leaving the kitchen in shadows, the scrambled eggs not quite done. Uncle Ray goes to the living room to put more coal in the stove, taking the percolator with him to keep it warm. When he comes back I’m spreading jam on bread for Hawk and Desmond. “You need to get dressed, Loraylee,” Uncle Ray say. “Go with me to the hospital. Hildie and Georgeanne can stay with the boys.”

  * * *

  “Livinia Belle Glover Hawkins has left us.” Pastor Polk’s voice rings out from the pulpit. “She was Bibi to her family, Livvie to all who knew her during her eighty-one years on this earth. We gather to mourn her passing, to comfort her family, to share our memories of a woman who touched many of us.”

  We have always sat in a pew in the middle of the church. Now here I am, up front, feeling like all eyes are on us. Archie and Retta are on the last row. We were still in the vestibule, waiting to be seated, when they got here. Archie gave my hand a squeeze—quick enough not to be noticed—and they took seats in the back. I saw them again when we followed the usher to the front, and it was all I could do not to stop. I wanted to have Archie with me, wanted that so bad.

  Uncle Ray put his arm around my waist as we walked toward the white casket covered with roses. Soon it would go in the hearse parked out front, then to the new cemetery off Beatties Ford, north of the interstate.

  The casket is locked up tight. Bibi told me more than once to be sure her box was closed. “Don’t want people gawking at me after I’m gone.” She told me, “I want a white box with roses on it, and not just red. All colors of roses.” The last few times she talked about it, she said for me to get Jonny No Age to do the flowers. I didn’t remind her that he passed. With his shop gone, I had to call a florist over on Morehead, somebody I never knew about before. They said I was asking the impossible, so many different roses in the dead of winter, but when I explained the situation, a kind woman said she’d do her best. It was expensive, but it was worth it, and there they ar
e: red, white, pink, lavender, and what Bibi would have loved the most, a bright orange.

  She died with Uncle Ray and me beside her at Good Samaritan. Never woke up again but she knew we were there. She squeezed my hand and her breathing stopped. We sat there quiet, Uncle Ray and me, letting her go.

  A woman took us to an office where we signed papers. She gave me a bag. “These are her things.” I couldn’t think what she meant, then I saw Bibi’s nightgown all folded up. Something heavy in the bottom of the bag. One of Uncle Ray’s gardening boots. He tossed it in the waste basket.

  We went to the elevator, stood side by side in the long hall, busy people passing us by. A baby cried somewhere way off.

  “Livvie’s soul has found a new home.” Uncle Ray’s eyes filled with tears. “Like I always say, death is birth.”

  Mr. Stone drove us away from Good Samaritan in the thin gray dusk, a few flakes still falling. Mrs. Stone was at our front door when we came up the steps. “She’s gone?”

  “Yes.” The electricity was still off, but the living room was warm from the coal stove. I knew the rest of the house would be icy. “Where’s Hawk?”

  He came into the living room, his winter coat on over his pajamas.

  I walked with him to the sofa.

  “Bibi gone to heaven?”

  “Yes.” He let me hold him for a long time. He already knew.

  On the way to church this morning he say, “Bibi won’t be sleeping in my bed anymore.”

  “That’s right.”

  “I didn’t mind when she did. I like sleeping in her bed, behind the curtain, talking to Uncle Ray.”

  “You can do that when you want.”

  He was quiet for a few minutes. “I’ve been thinking about that. I want to move in with Uncle Ray.”

  “That’d be all right,” I say and Uncle Ray say, “Fine by me.”

  Now he’s between me and Uncle Ray in his Sunday suit that was too short until I let the hems out. The choir sings, “His Eye Is on the Sparrow.” Bibi sang that hymn while she did dishes, mopped the floor, hung out the clothes. “I sing because I’m happy. I sing because I’m free. His eye is on the sparrow, and I know he watches me.” I hum along until my throat closes up, the tears starting again. I’ve been crying most of the four days since she left us.

  With Hawk snug by my side, Uncle Ray next to him, Grand and Pap in the pew behind us, I’m grateful I have family. During the service, Reverend Polk talks about Bibi, how she’s been like a mother to me. Makes me think of Candy Shumaker Hawkins, who I wouldn’t know if she walked in the door today. I favor her, at least in the one photo Grand gave me, taken right after I was born. In that picture Shushu is half turned, like she’s fixing to run. Her head’s tilted forward a bit, peeking at the camera from the corners of her eyes. Seemed to me she was saying, “You not gon get no picture of me.” When she left me and Daddy, I was still on the breast. Bibi say I cried for a week. “You near about starve before I could get you to take a bottle.”

  Bibi was my mama.

  CHAPTER 32

  Persy followed the teardown of Brooklyn through stories in the morning and afternoon papers, occasionally buying copies of the Mecklenburg Times and the Charlotte Post, though she didn’t share the latter with Blaire. It had been four years since she’d met Loraylee Hawkins and her son at the beach, but she still thought about them. The most recent article outlined Phase Four of the redevelopment, which included Brown Street, and which was scheduled to start soon.

  Persy set aside an area in the attic, where Blaire almost never went, and began to collect newspapers, sturdy paper bags, anything that could be used to wrap a teacup or a drinking glass. At the hardware store she bought a retractable tape measure, a box of marking pens, rolls of twine, masking tape, and labels. She got cardboard boxes from dumpsters behind grocery stores, collapsed and stacked them. As further ideas occurred to her, she added to her stash: a can of Dutch cleanser, Pine Oil disinfectant—she loved the smell of it—rags, a scrub brush. She’d been through enough moves to know what was needed, the last in the winter of 1954, into this house, right before she’d found out she was pregnant again.

  Several times over the next few weeks she drove to Brown Street. The houses in Loraylee’s neighborhood began to empty, the windows blank, grass growing wild in untended yards. On one visit Persy had seen Hawk walking toward home, a book satchel in his hand, taller, but his hair still the rusty color she remembered so well.

  In May another announcement appeared in the Observer: “Phase Four of the Brooklyn urban renewal project is underway. Forty acres bordered by Independence Boulevard, Ridge Street, Kenilworth Avenue, and South McDowell will be cleared in uptown Charlotte, making way for on-ramps to the new beltline. The Department of Transportation . . .” Persy stopped reading, pondered the term uptown. She asked Blaire about it.

  He said, “Makes sense. The Square is on a hill.”

  “It’s marketing. Uptown is posh; downtown is hayseed.” She showed him a small article on page two. “Laird Carson is getting out.”

  Blaire glanced at the story. “Yeah, Jerry told me.”

  Carson, who’d tried to collect double on the forty-thousand-dollar lien, had been sentenced to three years in prison; the restraining order was lifted and the sale to the city went through.

  “Did you know about the change in zoning, twenty years ago?” Persy asked Blaire.

  “It was common knowledge.”

  “Yes, common among those who did it. Rezoning from residential to industrial doomed Brooklyn, long before those who lived there knew what was coming.”

  “Brooklyn has to go, Persy. You’ll understand when you see the results, a revitalized downtown Charlotte.”

  Persy folded the newspaper and handed it to Blaire. “Uptown.” She went to their bedroom to check the list of packing supplies she’d stored in the attic, made up her mind to carry out her plan tomorrow. There was nothing she could do to stop the bulldozers, but she could make a small difference for Loraylee and her family.

  CHAPTER 33

  “Misery is when you heard on the radio that the neighborhood you live in is a slum but you always thought it was home.”

  —Langston Hughes

  Home will never again be 1105 Brown Street, Charlotte 2, North Carolina, where I was born in 1936, where Shushu left me when she went to Chicago, and where Bibi and Uncle Ray brought me up from a baby to the mother I am now. I’m glad Bibi never saw the day when the city say we got to move. She bought and paid for our home working forty years as a maid, but that came to nothing when the city say Brooklyn is blight. That which withers our hopes.

  We get the check from the city, settle the taxes due on Brown Street, and have seven thousand dollars left to find a new place to live. Uncle Ray say he wish Bibi could know, proud as she was to have paid off the mortgage. With Archie’s savings added in we have enough for a place north of the interstate, where folks might not mind us being mixed. But the first few we see are in neighborhoods that make me nervous, like eyes are studying us from the windows. Archie doesn’t notice.

  Day after day we go looking, hopeful, excited, but pretty soon I’m feeling like we never gon find anywhere we fit in. I have to keep reminding myself what Uncle Ray has told me time and again, “We can’t know how a thing gon turn out.”

  If Hawk is with us and we stop at a place, he ask me every time if Desmond gon live close by. Those two boys have been together since they learned to crawl, and I tell him all of us are hoping for that. I talk with Veola every couple days.

  Uncle Ray say his head’s swimming from the possibilities, but mine’s not because in three weeks of seeing first one, then another, not a single one is even close to what we need. Some we like are in all-white or all-black neighborhoods where one of us isn’t welcome. Like yesterday. A woman called to us from the yard of a house next door to one we were considering.

  “Hey.” She beckoned Archie to come to her yard, talking loud, had to know I could hear every word.
“You must be the Realtor.” Before he could set her straight, she say, “Not that I have anything against nigras, but since you’re in the business, you know how values go down when they move in.” She gestured to us with a broom, started back sweeping while she talked. “We have lived here twenty years, got a lot invested in it.”

  He finally got a word in. “I’m not a Realtor. I’m with them. We’re looking at the house with a mind to buying it.” He walked back to us. She frowned, went into her house, shaking her head.

  Hawk pulled me back toward the car. “This is not it,” he say. That made Archie laugh.

  We finally find a house Uncle Ray say he wants to live in. A duplex, like Auntie Violet’s place at the beach. He looks around at the front yard, say to Hawk, “Could take out one of the hedges, plant a magnolia right there. Let’s go to the back, see is there room for my roses and tomatoes, a swing for you. Maybe even a chicken coop.”

  Across the street a black man’s on a ladder, cleaning the gutters. “He could be a hired man, or he could live there,” Archie say. Then a colored woman comes out the front door carrying what look like a glass of tea, which she hands up to the man on the ladder.

  Archie laughs. “Pretty clear they live there.”

  As run-down as it is, Archie is excited. “In a duplex I could live on one side and y’all on the other.” I don’t like this idea one bit and am about to tell him when he say, “We can cut a door in the living room wall, an archway that’ll open up the breakfast nook, too, give us a dining room.”

  A thumping sound comes from the back of the house. Hawk’s on the floor in one of the bedrooms, kicking the wall.

  “What’s wrong?” I say.

  His face is a storm. “There’s a bug in the bathtub. A big one.”

  Archie sits down next to him. “This place has been empty for a long time. We’ll get rid of the bugs, don’t you worry.”

  Hawk kicks the wall again. “I peed in the toilet, but it won’t flush.”

  I have to bite my lip not to laugh. “I reckon the water’s not on.”