We Are Taking Only What We Need

by Stephanie Powell Watts

  Dedication

  To Bob and Auden, the loves of my life

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Introduction

  Family Museum of the Ancient Postcards

  If You Hit Randolph County, You’ve Gone Too Far

  We Are Taking Only What We Need

  Unassigned Territory

  All the Sad Etc.

  Welcome to the City of Dreams

  Do You Remember the Summer of Love?

  Black Power

  Highway 18

  There Can Never Be Another Me

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Also by Stephanie Powell Watts

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Introduction

  When I was a kid we moved around a lot. We didn’t always move out of town and never out of the state of North Carolina, and often our move was just a few streets or neighborhoods over from where we started. I can’t remember the first time we moved when I knew for sure it would only be temporary, that there would always be another pack-up, another move—a few months, maybe a year at the most down the line.

  I do, however, remember our first move. After my parents’ divorce, my mother, two of my four brothers, and I left our dirt road for a house in the next small town. The house was old though not charmingly so, definitely in before condition, and surrounded by many other tiny, rundown houses. It wasn’t all bad, though. Even now, more than thirty years later, I think of the to-the-ceiling white kitchen cabinets and the phone niche in the hallway with some fondness. For the few months we lived there, we stumbled over boxes, trash bags of clothes, toys, and miscellaneous junk hastily piled anywhere there was space. We did not stay at this house long enough to fully unpack.

  I remember being so excited. I know this is hard to believe, but moving was a great adventure. Life was different then. The people we knew were skinny and poor and drove around in dogs of cars and counted out money from their piggy banks at the end of the month for gas. We did not travel. We knew nothing of the world. We marveled at the middle-aged white people we knew from school or work that had been to Paris, France, and London, England, and could prove it with slides. We didn’t have disposable income—that wasn’t even a phrase we knew yet—and everyone we knew lived frugally by necessity. I remember my mother and a friend talking about another friend who was having such hard times she had to use a credit card at the grocery store! I’ve thought of their conversation many times when I’m paying for bananas and a carton of milk with my Visa.

  My mother was convinced and convincing, and every time she felt the need, she sold us on the idea that this next move would change our lives. She believed in the power of place as the springboard for our reinvention. Anything was possible this time. The slate of our existence would be wiped clean and we would get to rethink and redo everything. I caught her enthusiasm. I loved the anticipation of the move, the process of going through our possessions and deciding what was worthy enough to make the trip to a new life. Those too baggy shorts, toss; the once-loved blouse with the impossible stain, out. We had to travel light. We had room only for the good. My mother’s motto could have been, “Change your address and change your life. This time we are going to get everything just right.”

  I have since learned that a good number of poor women with their children move with regularity. But at the time, when I was young, I knew of only one other kid who moved around like I did. She had come from a big city and told me in one of our true confession sessions that her mother could not stay put. The last move my friend made in childhood had been to North Carolina when her mother left her in the care of her grandmother and had not returned. I learned then the power of a secret to seal a relationship. Tell me a secret and I give you my trust. I had imagined all that time that I was the only one coming to school red-eyed and exhausted after spending most of the night unpacking boxes. But I have learned as a grown person that there is no malady, or pathology in this wide world that someone else isn’t suffering right along with you. Mothers all over the country and from every walk of life, like my mom, scrape together every penny they have, set their sights on a new place, and start over. I get it. The urge for change, any life-altering change, is strong. The desperate need for control of anything at all is even stronger. Moving is kinetic and purposeful at just a time when the world seems most out of control. The mind needs diversion from constant trouble and grows weary from weariness, tired from constant fatigue. The mind can focus only so long on lack or pain or loneliness, and needs a persistent and consuming outlet that feels necessary. Pack everything you own, stuff the kids in the car. Find the right house or apartment and find the right life.

  I have been thinking a lot about moving since my family bought a new house (new to me) in Allentown, Pennsylvania. My young child did not want the change. I love our home, mama, I don’t want to leave. The old feeling of excitement and dread and the thrill of maybe this time that I thought I’d buried too deep to access welled up, but now I was the pleading mama. “You will love it, honey. We will be near a park. Your room will be so beautiful. Everything will be just like you want it.” It wasn’t just talk. I was willing happiness into being, insisting on it. I would not tell my sweet son that being on the move made me feel like an outsider, but like a seeker too. I still worry that in the rest and the nesting that the seeker discovers that no room can ever truly fit, no apartment, no house has space enough for the seeker’s great and consuming needs.

  I have not lived with my mother for more than a generation now. It has been a long time since I’ve felt her enthusiasm sweeping me all along to the next house and the next bright future. Somehow even after all this time, I feel the tickle of desire every two or three years to pack the car, leave the broken and unloved detritus behind, travel two streets or two towns over, and start again. Everybody in the car together.

  The stories in my collection are about young African American women trying to find their homes in the world. The stories are set in North Carolina in the new south, post-segregation, post–Jim Crow, post-lawful separation of races, but those ghosts endure. My characters are usually poor, but not content to be so. They are usually watchers, but at crucial moments are compelled to act. They are girls determined to be proud women. The world has a place for them and they will find it. And some of them will find that place that can finally feel like home.

  Family Museum of the Ancient Postcards

  In April 1976 my uncle Silas on my daddy’s side got out of jail early after two years and five months of time served for arson. We welcomed him with dinners and back slaps, ignored the pink guilty splotches on his face, places on his skin that would never fully heal, regarded him with a child’s wonder, his disappearing act a magic trick, now you don’t, but now you do see him.

  July ’76 was the bicentennial for white people, and though we agreed with our black Muslim cousin and black nationalist neighbor, “whose 200 years of freedom?” we all marveled at the fireworks in town, bigger and better than usual, some of us with our arms crossed over our chests in protest, but all of us with faces tilted to the clear summer sky.

  But most remarkably, late in that year, forty-one-year-old Ginny Harshaw, my mother’s aunt’s child, my cousin, though I called her Aunt Ginny, found a husband. We’d given up on her long, long ago. But just when she had ceased to be a variable in the world of change, Aunt Ginny shocked us with Gerald, five foot, maybe a little more, with a big round belly taut as a starving child’s. Though Aunt Ginny was an imposing woman, tall and big boned, a woman’s beautiful, “her cheekbones,” the women said, her “long
fingers like a pianist,” they said, though no man ever noticed, apparently, except for Gerald.

  Our family talked. My mother, her sisters and brothers, wives of brothers, everyone had something to say about Aunt Ginny and Gerald. But none of our mocking importance or our jokes made Aunt Ginny twist in shame or doubt the certainty of her mind. Nothing stopped her from rushing like a teenager out her mama’s door when Gerald’s Gran Torino rattled up the drive. “He is not afraid,” she said, and neither was she as she launched herself into the world, sprung and released like a sharp stone from a slingshot. After all those years of living with her mother and her dead father, gone now for twenty-five of those years, she finally flew the coop. On the way out the door, her hard suitcase on the porch already (she would return for her personal things soon, she said), pillowcases of summer clothes packed in the trunk of Gerald’s car, she bent to her mother’s chair in the front room, her hair dyed black as a Chinawoman’s, tickled Aunt Ginny’s lips, “Bye Mama,” she said. Once on the porch, she threw a kiss to her father. “Thank you, merciful God,” she said aloud. At that same moment, she thought she’d never again have to hear her father’s dead steps in the attic or behind her, no more heavy breath, sour from old cigarettes, lingering in the dark places of the creaky house he put together with his own hands. Enough, Enough, she thought, not sure if what she felt wasn’t ecstasy. Poor Aunt Ginny. She didn’t know (how could she?) how dangerous and foolish it is to count on anything for the rest of your life.

  WE DIDN’T HEAR MUCH from Aunt Ginny in those early months, though we saw her every week on Sunday at my grandmother’s. She stayed close to Gerald, served him food like the other wives, patted his hand, looked at him with what we thought was longing when he stood up too early to take her back to their home. We tried to get him to talk and included him the best we knew how. His people weren’t neighbors or friends of ours; they were poor blacks, what we called Boomer rats, who lived many in dark houses out on tangled dirt roads on the fringes of the county. Our own dirt roads and tiny houses where we lived were exempt from judgment. We thought we could make nice talk, let him know he was free to sit among us. We told him how Ginny cooked the best turkey, juicy, we said. Years ago, we said, Ginny’s hair was a marvel, black and shiny as a satin sheet, long enough for her to sit on. One time, a white man tried to buy it right off her head in Charlotte. Ginny would run her hand through her now-short curls embarrassed to have all that past called up. And though nobody told it, Aunt Ginny knew we were all thanking Gerald for making her (the one we’d all called the lost cause) as normal as any of the other women. Gerald nodded, squinted his eyes in concentration. “Is that right?” was the most he’d say.

  A couple of times Aunt Ginny came to Sunday dinner alone, dumb and still as a cow, waiting for the best moment to make her excuses and leave. But soon, though no one is sure exactly when, Aunt Ginny stopped coming at all. “Too far,” she said. “Busy, you know how it is,” she said, deepening her voice, hinting at sexual delights she hoped the long-married women remembered and coveted. But we knew Gerald was to blame. He had been the only person to change Ginny, the only one to make her want to snap her inertia and escape, shedding the kidnapper’s ropes and leaving them in a snaky heap behind her. Whatever roots he worked, prayers or curses he hurled on the air, we knew without fighting it that it was powerful magic. Our best hope was that Aunt Ginny was too happy not to play along with Gerald. We were, of course, disappointed.

  Almost eight months after her departure, Aunt Ginny came back to us, with her lips grim and set in a freeze that even death couldn’t remove. Aunt Ginny rode shotgun beside her mother in the passenger seat of the Buick, her clothes in pillowcases in the back seat, the hard case luggage, a high school graduation present, forgotten in the rush.

  “My nerves can’t take all this,” Aunt Ginny’s mother said as she parked in the drive, theatrically lumbering to her chair in the front room. “You ought not put me through it.” Her clothes out of the car, Aunt Ginny rested in her room, tried not to look at the lumpy pillowcases leaking her panties and hastily stuffed polyester from their open tops. She kicked the bag off the edge of the bed, and the rags exploded like confetti on the floor. “I’m back, bastard,” she whispered, sure her father had heard.

  We wouldn’t say it to her. We are not cruel, but we knew all along Aunt Ginny would return. Late marriages can’t take; we nodded in agreement. The old are tired, sapless and try it, be our guest, but you can’t make it without hope, the antidote to despair, that the old have irretrievably lost. Though we wanted different for her, we knew Aunt Ginny’s story would take one of just a few predictable shapes. The way they told it, Gerald beat Aunt Ginny for being tall, for glancing at him without tenderness as he drifted to sleep, for trying to prove that he could be loved. Aunt Ginny would not say, but something brought her home in a hurry. We thought we understood.

  Aunt Ginny tried; you have to give her that. We saw her trying, felt her stretching for something good. We knew that what she wanted was that glad day when the life with Gerald that she knew was just around the corner finally materialized, poof, in a cloud of sorcerer’s smoke. “You’ll learn fooling with low class niggers,” Aunt Ginny’s mother said, the smug joy in her heart obvious on her face, a cruel, cutting brightness like a sunny winter sky. Now, Aunt Ginny would have no reason to ever again refute what her mother told her.

  I suppose Aunt Ginny’s return to Mills Road and her mother was the only reason she and I connected. She was then a forty-two-year-old woman, not even a divorcée since she never really married like we assumed, and I was fourteen. To say we had a lot in common is wrong on the face of it, but same knows same, one desperation calls out without speaking to another, and we became friends. In the midst of the murmur of the family crowd, the occasional dolphin-high screams of the smallest children, the chatter: Do we have more paper plates? Mama, can I have . . . ? Cal, turn down that television; is this the last of the cake? Linda, Joyce, don’t let your boys play on the stairs, Aunt Ginny retreated to the living room, forbidden for children, with her romance novel from Goodwill and a pencil.

  “Are you looking for something?” she said.

  “I’ll know when I find it,” I said creeping my way along the back of the stiff Victorian sofa, full of shiny tasseled pillows that had to be moved to allow anyone to sit. Above the fake fireplace, my grandmother had pictures of her favorite children, her son James, a rakish knowing on his face as he stood on the tarmac on some army base in Germany, and her youngest boy, the artist (still in Denver or has he moved again?), smiling wide, a beauty in his high school graduation cap and gown. I hesitated to look directly at Aunt Ginny, convinced that seeing her face would compel me to leave.

  “What are you doing in here anyway?” I said.

  Aunt Ginny sighed and held up With This Ring, her romance, an old one judging by the ragged cover of faded and almost disappeared lovers in a posed embrace, framed by the curve of overlapping wedding rings. “I’m reading my literature.”

  “Those books are trash,” I laughed, unable to keep the smugness out of my voice.

  “That’s my business.”

  “They’re all the same book.”

  “Oh, so you know everything, is that how it is?”

  “I never said I know everything.”

  “Really, I thought every twelve-year-old in the world knew it all.”

  “I’m fourteen, Aunt Ginny.”

  Aunt Ginny laughed, “Oh, excuse me, fourteen. Come back when you’re thirty with a lick of sense.” Aunt Ginny had clearly been asleep, and her hair was matted on one side, her face was still slack with it. She didn’t look like a person with knowledge of any true thing.

  “Why don’t you stay home if you want to avoid everybody so bad?”

  AUNT GINNY SUCKED her teeth in disgust but didn’t answer right away, like she was considering the idea and trying to think of a real response. “I couldn’t tell you,” she snorted. Every week we talked, read, but mostly li
stened as Sunday moved along in the next room. My grandmother and her widowed sister sat at the kitchen table, their stomachs pleased and pouted in their cooking smocks, sighing with fatigue. Harold, the oldest, telling stories that ended with him righteous and victorious. “He’s a dick,” Aunt Ginny said, and I nodded. I had suspected as much. From the basement, the male voices rumbled, my grandfather barking proper form for the free weights, his yelps punctuated by the routine of the click of metal on metal. My mother’s voice was swallowed in the clamor of women talk. Every Sunday, for months, I met Aunt Ginny in the living room as I passed by my own mama without a word. We often handled each other like we were hot around the edges, careful not to start another round of the war we both heard rumbling in the near distance. I felt my mother’s sad eyes follow my back into the living room. Long years would pass before I knew to feel sorry for her.

  MY GRANDMOTHER’S HOUSE is on Mills Road, just off Highway 16, little more than a path used for years by loggers. When my mother was just a girl, she loved to listen to the saws and the pull, then catch, of the flat-headed blades in the meat of the trees. The jangle, then click, of the metal chains twisting around the logs dragging them from the woods. The trees were almost nude with most of the leaves and branches gone, the tops lopped off, headless, making them look more like skinned animals than wood. Once, when the workingmen used uncovered tractors in these hilly woods, a man hired to gather felled trees was killed, cracked to pieces by a massive pine that rushed to him, his back no obstacle to the tree’s progress to the ground. The trees the men cut fall with tremendous noise, destroying without compunction or remorse the absentminded or just unlucky.

  That story must have haunted my mother because every time she told it, her face glowed with the same amazement and surprise, the same awe. And though I no longer wanted to hear my mother’s stories, I couldn’t help but think about her standing where I stood, a girl too, schooled already in the language of last resort.