That night Cecile didn’t sleep out on the floor where Mr. Lucas, Uncle D, and JimmyTrotter slept. We pushed the twin beds together in our room and she slept between Fern and me. She cradled Fern while I held on to one of my mother’s braids, and fell asleep twirling her braids for their coarse and soft feel. The smell of coconut oil. And she let me.
Caleb sounded the alarm early the next morning. Once JimmyTrotter said, “Sheriff Charles,” we all gathered in the front room, but no one spoke. We waited as the black-and-white car barreled up to the house. He came alone. Without his dog. Without Vonetta. Big Ma lost her knees and melted down into the chair. Mr. Lucas, Pa, and Uncle Darnell rushed to her.
I studied the sheriff from the window. His hard, slow walk. The tilt of his hat. I studied him to know what he’d say before he said it. Cecile’s hand squeezed my hand. Tight. So tight I could scream. But I didn’t.
JimmyTrotter opened the door and Sheriff Charles walked inside. He nodded once to cover greeting us all and said, “Folks,” but he spoke only to Ma Charles thereafter. “Mama,” he started.
“Speak, boy,” Ma Charles said.
“Mama,” he said again. “It was how I said.”
Big Ma moaned and called for Jesus but Mr. Lucas was there.
“Taranada throwed her here and there. Li’l thing like that hardly stood a chance, but she’s in the hospital. S’maritans found her. Picked her up. Took her to Mercy. One sore heinie, one broke arm. Face scratched up. Could have been worse.”
And then the screaming and the hallelujahs broke out. JimmyTrotter, Fern, and I jumped and hollered and ring-danced. Sheriff shook his head and said, “Just like a bunch of . . .” He didn’t say “Negroes.” Everyone was too busy praising the Lord over Vonetta, and we refused to hear him.
Except for Mrs. “How dare you!” she said. “How dare you speak to this family like that!”
Pa said, “Calm down, dear. We’re not in Brooklyn.”
My mother said, “Call me what you want. I want to see my daughter.”
Miss Trotter poked her sister and said, “Slim Jim Trotter and his two wives.”
“Isn’t it the truth?” the other said.
Darnell said, “Lou, you got the Wildcat. I’ll take the truck.”
A revived Big Ma said, “Let’s all go see Vonetta!”
Mrs. was too disgusted to partake in the glee. She didn’t understand; if you prayed for the miracle you’d sell your most treasured possession for, you don’t care about anything else but waiting on that miracle. I knew I had a piece of the South in me but I didn’t know it was that much.
Sheriff Charles said, “Now look. Mercy’s a good Christian hospital but they don’t want to see all you . . . Negroes showing up at once. I’ll take the mother and father. Road’s still not good.”
We all wanted to go but Pa said, “Just me and Cecile.” To the sheriff he said, “We’ll take our car. I’ll follow.” Mrs. didn’t like it but he said, “Marva, you’re in a family way. You need to rest. We’ll be right back.”
Big Ma said, “Junior, I’m coming with you. I just have to get my hat and purse and change my clothes.”
But Pa was already walking away. Sheriff Charles had a word with my father before he got in the patrol car. Pa called Cecile to come get in the car.
“Tell Vonetta we’re glad she’s not in the sweet by-and-by,” Fern said.
“Tell Vonetta I’m sorry,” I said.
Cecile said, “You’ll tell her.” But her voice was soft on me and not pointed. I almost smiled. Then she slid into the front seat of the Wildcat. The Wildcat coughed a little before she started growling and rumbling. I stood on the porch and watched my mother and father follow the sheriff down the road.
Sad Irons
Pa and Cecile had been gone for hours. All we could do was wait to hear more news about Vonetta. How she looked. Was she in casts and bandages? Was she conscious? When could she come home?
When I couldn’t wait any longer, I did the one thing I was determined not to do. The one thing I dreaded since I knew we were headed south. I took the sheets off the clothesline and brought them inside for ironing.
Ma Charles’s irons didn’t have electric cords. They were her mother’s irons. One was a wedding present to Ma Charles when she married Henry Charles, and the other she inherited when my great-great-grandmother Livonia passed away.
I sat each iron on the stove and turned on the flames. Instead of the canned spray starch that Mrs. preferred when she did iron, I made the starch in a bowl, the way Big Ma had taught me when we first drove down south. Water, Argo, and a bit of crushed lavender. I took the older iron and flicked a few drops on its surface. The drops hissed metal and lavender and evaporated almost instantly. The iron was ready. I dipped my fingers in the bowl, swirled them around, and flung the drops of starchy water onto the sheet laid out on the ironing board. There was nothing left to do but press hard.
I wasn’t surprised to learn my great-aunt, like her sister, preferred her cotton sheets lightly starched and didn’t trust the feel of permanent press fabric. Why should she be any different than her sister?
Both irons were small, but they were heavy and had their own way of being moved across the cotton fabric. I learned to handle both and pressed until sweat coated my forehead, neck, and arms. I pressed and I prayed. It was only right that pressing went with prayer. That and being sorry. Every wrinkle was a patch of sorry to be smoothed and flattened. I gripped the old wooden handle and pressed until the heat waned. Then I switched irons. If ironing stiff white cloth in the heat hadn’t killed anyone who’d held the handles and pressed and prayed, then I could do what they’d done. I could iron until the cotton sheet was smooth.
Everyone had shown me what Big Ma called “a mercy” when I didn’t deserve one. In my heart I knew I wouldn’t have been so kind to Vonetta if her meanness had caused Fern to run off. I knew I would have made her feel worthless every minute that Fern was missing.
“Thought I smelled some oppression burning.” JimmyTrotter snuck up on me. His oppression began with a long vowel “o.” O-ppression. “White sheets?”
I could feel the smirk. There he was, grinning at me. Even that felt good because that was the JimmyTrotter I knew. “Yeah,” I said.
“Don’t let me stop you from oppressing.”
“Very funny.”
He bladed his finger across my forehead and flicked the sweat away. He wanted me to know how much I was sweating, as if I didn’t know already.
He stood there for a while, I guessed to needle me some more. Then he said, “You’re hard on Vonetta.”
I set the iron on an unlit pilot to cool. “I know,” I said.
“I had a brother. A twin.”
“I know.”
“I’d give anything . . .”
He couldn’t finish. I whispered, “I know.”
Sign of Love
The phone rang around seven. Two long rings. The shock of the first ring made everyone both jump and then freeze. Finally Uncle Darnell grabbed the phone and announced that it was Pa calling. He said, “Vonetta is well enough to come home as soon as they release her from the hospital.”
We waited, excited to see Vonetta and to have her home.
All of the sheets were ironed and folded.
Big Ma and I cooked supper. Two chickens. Two heads of cabbage with corn relish. Rice. Potatoes. Rolls. Peach cobbler topped with pecans and sugar. Iced tea. Lemonade.
We waited.
We prayed and ate.
We waited some more.
Then Big Ma said, “We should have gone to the hospital. We should have gone to see about Vonetta.”
“Her mama and papa are there to see about her,” Ma Charles said. “That’s all that’s needed.”
“Hmp. The way they ran out of here, those two . . .”
“You’d run too if it was your child.”
“Hmp. Who was there when he couldn’t pay for a doctor to birth them? Who was there to grow them up in
all the right ways? Who? Who?”
Ma Charles wasn’t moved by anything Big Ma said. “All of that is its own reward,” she said. “No need to stand up and take a bow. Am I right, sister?”
“Right as the rain threatening to fall tomorrow.”
But Mrs. looked worried with all of that talk about Cecile and Pa being gone long. She tried to be her “right on” Marva Hendrix self, but she looked like she was set adrift in a small boat without an oar, searching around for help. I hated to see her like that. I wanted the old Miss Marva Hendrix back.
“Mrs.,” I said. “Can I make you some tea?”
She smiled closer to her real smile and said, “No, Delphine. I’ve drunk enough tea.”
“Can I roll your hair for bed?” She used more than fifty sponge rollers to make her big curly Afro. When she hesitated I said, “I’ll go get the rollers.”
She was sitting up snoring before I finished rolling half of her head. I looked down at her hands clasped on her small belly. The idea of having a new sister or brother became more real. Now that I knew Vonetta was alive and would be home any minute, I could enjoy the fact that there would soon be one more of us. I hoped that would be a good thing.
Mrs.’s head was a pink spongy globe. I led her to the back bedroom and then started to mop the kitchen floor. I had to be awake when Vonetta walked through the door. I had to tell her I was sorry.
I held out as long as I could but fell asleep, my arm propped against the windowsill. When the morning came, my neck was stiff and my elbows sore, but the Wildcat was in the gravel driveway, parked a little farther down from the house. My parents sat in the front seat talking. I almost yelled, “They’re here! They’re here!” But it was that they were parked away from the house that kept me from calling out. They didn’t want us to know they were there, and for a moment I worried something was wrong with Vonetta.
But then they both finally got out of the car, and I stayed at the window wrapping myself in the sheer white curtains as I watched my mother and father. Watched how they were with each other. Watched how they were more than my parents. They were two people who knew each other. Liked each other. Even when all I could remember were the loud noises. The crash of things being thrown. The smell of fresh paint my father used to cover Cecile’s writing on the wall. And yelling. More yelling. I was now seeing what I thought I’d never see. What I had long given up wishing for. I was seeing my mother and father together and not angry. All I wanted was a sign that we came from love. Now that I saw it, through this window, I didn’t know what to make of it. How could it be that the more I saw of my parents, the less I knew them?
I watched them as they were fixed on getting Vonetta out of the backseat. Cecile squatted down at the back passenger seat and then emerged with Vonetta, who took a step or two before Cecile scooped her up. Pa tried to take Vonetta from Cecile but Cecile kept moving toward the house.
When they neared the porch, I couldn’t contain myself. “They’re here!” I shouted. “They’re here! With Vonetta!”
Uncle Darnell had already left for school. JimmyTrotter was coaxing Sophie and checking on Butter, but I was sure he’d come running. Mr. Lucas jumped up and tried to look awake. Big Ma marched out from her room, probably with a thing or two on her mind. Ma Charles and Miss Trotter would soon be there.
I swung the door open and stepped aside to let them in. It was as if everything had turned around. Cecile didn’t carry Vonetta around when she was a baby, but today she held Vonetta in her arms. Vonetta, who was far beyond the age of being picked up, clung to Cecile like a shy child. Papa trailed in behind them.
Big Ma’s arms were crossed underneath her breasts. “Where yawl been? Around the world and back?”
Cecile walked right past her and left that question to my father.
Pa took Vonetta from Cecile and laid her on the couch.
“VONETTA!” Fern was about to leap on her when JimmyTrotter grabbed her in midflight.
“Hold on, Fern. She broke some bones.”
“Give her some room. Let her breathe,” Cecile said.
I expected Vonetta to say, “Yeah. Let me breathe,” or something like that. But she said nothing.
I knelt down so she wouldn’t have to look up. “I’m so glad, Vonetta. I’m so glad you’re here. I missed you,” I said. “And I’m so, so sorry.”
“Truly sorry,” Fern said.
“Me too,” Vonetta said shyly. Her face was covered in scabs, but I looked in her eyes and tried to hide the shock of seeing her face scratched up so badly. Vonetta didn’t say anything else, but she lifted her arm to show me her cast.
All I could say was, “Wow,” like a dummy. Fern asked if it hurt and Vonetta shook her head no and then yes.
I unbuckled my watch strap and said, “You can have my watch.”
She shook her head no.
“All right. That’s enough for now,” Cecile said. “Give her some room. You all will be making your noise before you know it.” She meant the way our voices followed one another’s like a song. Our voices seemed to sing those songs less and less.
Everyone made a fuss over Vonetta, which was only right. Then Ma Charles asked, “What took you so long, son?”
“Speak up, Slim Jim Trotter,” Miss Trotter said.
And Mrs. said to Pa, “Why didn’t you call?”
My mother’s face went to stone, which was about her normal face when she wasn’t the crazy mother mountain. Ever since my mother walked inside my great-grandmother’s house I had been bracing myself for her kind of crazy. I held my breath waiting for her to open her mighty mouth and say awful things, loud—laying it down, telling it like it is. But under all of this questioning, her face was expressionless but not hard or angry. She was focused on Vonetta.
Even though Cecile said to give Vonetta room, neither Fern nor I could leave her side. We clamored to see Vonetta, be with her, touch her. Her hair had been braided along both sides of her head in tight knots. I knew it was my mother’s hand at work. I knew she braided Vonetta’s hair and not some hospital nurse.
Fern kept touching Vonetta’s crown, where the braid was fat and flat. “Don’t,” she said in her real voice. Even so, I was glad to hear it.
“I can loosen it for you,” I said.
“No,” she said. “No.”
I expected Vonetta to be chatty. I expected her to perform everything from leaving the house, riding the bike, and getting thrown by the tornado and so on. But she said very little.
Pa said, “They let her lie there on one of them gurneys for nearly a day before anyone even looked at her. They took their time about treating her and finding her family and they took their time about signing her out. You know how that goes. Same old, same old.”
Cecile didn’t look at him once while he explained. She stuck to Vonetta.
“We should get this written up in the papers,” Mrs. said. “They can’t treat blacks this way.”
“We’ll do no such thing. Writing up a hospital. Who ever heard of that?” Big Ma said.
“From what I understand,” Papa began, “she’d been thrown far. We’re very lucky.”
“Who needs luck when you have the good Lord,” Ma Charles said.
“And it doesn’t hurt that her great-great-grandpa could fly like a bird,” Miss Trotter said.
“Oh, sister, stop telling those Indian tales.”
“I’ll stop when you stop telling your tales.”
Big Ma told them both to stop fussing and to be thankful. But she was still angry at Pa for having been gone so long, and angrier at Cecile—who she called the “root of all evil.” Fern and I waited for crazy to come out of our mother, but to our shock, Cecile behaved as if Big Ma wasn’t there.
That night Mrs. was angry at Pa. Big Ma stayed angry at Pa and Cecile. I, for one, was glad I had seen my parents from the window and how they were together. I had to treasure it, because Pa and Cecile didn’t look each other’s way or say a word between them once we were all inside the
house. No one seemed happier than Miss Trotter. She enjoyed the sounds of family—angry, miffy, joyful, and all else in between. At the table that night, with Pa and Mrs. on one side and Cecile, Vonetta, Fern, and I on the other, our family gave thanks that Vonetta was home safe. “If you call broken bones ‘safe,’” Miss Trotter added, “then let us be grateful.”
Uncle Darnell walked in with a gallon of cow’s milk from the McDaniels’ farm. Cecile said something to Vonetta, and Vonetta’s head sank low. Uncle Darnell greeted everyone, said, “Hi, sis,” to Cecile, and stood before Vonetta.
“You all right, Net-Net?” he asked.
Vonetta took one look at Uncle D and burst into tears. He just said, “It’s all right, Net-Net. It’s all right.”
Kind of Truth
We had fallen asleep with both twin beds pushed together—Cecile, Vonetta with her cast, Fern, and I. Somewhere in the shifting to get a better sleeping position I felt my mother’s absence. The space she left seemed extra-large. After so much warmth the bed was suddenly cool. I sprang up. Cecile had on her pants. My father’s pants. She slung her drawstring bag over her shoulder and was leaving.
I followed her as she moved around carefully, without big, heavy footsteps. Cecile went through the kitchen to avoid everyone sleeping in the living room. She opened the back door and slipped outside.
“Go back, Delphine,” she said.
“You’re leaving? Where are you going?”
“Home,” she said. “Oakland.”
“But Vonetta’s not better yet.”
“She been found. There’s a house full of y’all to take care of her.”
“She wants you.”
“She’s got me. But I can’t be here.”
I thought she was talking about the South. That even though they had taken down the “White Only” signs, you still had to know your place. I thought that’s what she meant.
I said, “It’s not Oakland, I guess.”
She said, “You got that right. It’s not Oakland. Now, go back inside, Delphine.”
Gone Crazy in Alabama Page 17
