Good Negress

by Verdelle, A. J.

  Harold Grayson had steadied the car. I fumbled for the window handle, looking to meet her eyes, and I rolled the window down. I could see her deciding whether to come to the car.

  “Iss cool, Granma’am,” I said. “Go in.”

  HE LET ME cry undisturbed till he ate his banana. He offered me mine, but I didn’t want it. What I wanted was more air through my nose.

  We were going first to Washington, D.C., to pick up his cousin. “Soon we’ll be crossing the Potomac,” he said. “Have you ever seen it?” He took quick glances at me. My arms were folded hard across my chest, and knowing I had about three words to say, I wanted to save them and so shook my head no.

  “No you don’t want the banana, or no you haven’t seen the Potomac?” He was trying to entertain me or maybe trying to distract me, but I had to keep a deluge dammed. I waited some time, swallowing. I was thinking, neither one, but I didn’t answer. I looked out the big clean car window at the ground: the road was divided, painted hard down the middle, cut in two like me.

  I looked inside my head at Granma’am: she would be sitting in the parlor in the big chair where she and the good Lord met to wait for her burdens to lift. She wouldn’t be doing much else but that, we had cooked all the food she’d need for some days. At just the last moment before you give up on someone, decide they’re rude or lost or just won’t talk, I pressed a voice and answered Harold Grayson, “Neither one,” about the banana and the Potomac.

  In a few years, Granma’am will send a letter to me, thinking it is probably time that I’m looking at boys for boyfriends. Among other things she says in the letter is this: I want you to consider Harold Grayson, he’s a good, steady boy, ain’t he? I am not surprised, reading it, at what Granma’am has to say, but I do think it’s funny, and out of the question. By the time I get this letter of hers, I am only interested in teaching or nursing, and nothing in between. But Granma’am and I are so far away by then that she wouldn’t know how my interests got squeezed into form.

  We did cross the Potomac, took barely thirty minutes. Harold Grayson talked about the rivers he’d seen. He hadn’t been these places to do his mortician work: their family worked mostly in Michigan and Virginia. But because the dead increase, he had money to drive and cross rivers.

  By ten, we were at the home of Harold Grayson’s aunt Ruth. Harold Grayson’s cousin had changed his mind about going, and Harold was for a moment disappointed like a pet. But Harold Grayson’s aunt Ruth had fixed us a big breakfast. In honor of Harold’s visit, which she knew would be short. We all sat to the table, Harold at the foot and his uncle Elvan at the head; Harold’s cousin, Elvan Jr., blessed the food and asked the Lord’s protection for our trip. As my verse I said, “Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth.”

  Harold and I both ate like travellers. I surprised myself. His very kind family ate well too, and didn’t contain their delight at seeing Harold. We ate all the grits and slab bacon, scrapple and eggs, plenty hot bread and preserves. For them, it was a noisy, happy breakfast. I didn’t talk really, but didn’t cry either; I considered that my best. The breakfast took as long as it needed to, and not any time more. Industrious Harold Grayson invited me to wash up, and told his family we’d be going. It was eleven-thirty, and we were driving straight through, he said. Behind the latched door, the family’s laughing was low-voiced and mixed with food. An easy goodbye. They had had their meal in the name of joy, and full as I was, the food had been a shovel, its weight thrown like dirt into the hole of me. I didn’t know how Harold would drive after all this; I would either sleep, or suffocate.

  WE GOT BACK in the car, and got back on the road. I could not settle down. Too full, too anxious. Too, too.

  Harold had everything we brought with us lined up neat on the back floor. Nothing spilt. The Mason jars all had pieces of plastic stretched over the mouths and the lids screwed on over top, which made plastic skirts for the peoplelike jars. The brown paper bag housed chicken, fruit, and pound cake. In the midst of my misery I had thought the pound cake was spoon biscuits. But everything stood upright and immobile, ready to be reached in. I couldn’t think of eating, not today, not tomorrow. I wanted to vomit, to break all the car windows, break all tradition, break Harold’s neck. I sat still and quiet, deferential, well trained.

  The car was big, and warm inside due to the engine running. I didn’t feel too much of the road underneath. Soon as we got going from the Washington, D.C., stop, Harold told me in conversation that as the one passenger, my job would be to keep him up.

  “You git sleepy when you drive, Harold Grayson?”

  “Actually, I don’t, but it’s every passenger’s job to keep the driver company.”

  “Oh,” I said.

  “Do you like this car?” he asked me.

  “Yeah,” I answer. It is a nice car. It moves. And the engine sounds quiet like a hum. It eats up the road, and that part makes me angry, but I just concentrate and swallow, and the bile goes back down.

  “Do you like the brown, Neesey?” Now that made me chuckle a little. So like Harold Grayson to get a brown car. Middle brown, like dirt, like flatland, like the country where I had lived.

  “I like the brown,” I answer, and it is not a lie. The whole car, though, is brown and white. Brown on top and around the bottom and the sides, and white in between and around the tires. Like spats.

  “And what else?”

  “What else what?” I say.

  “What else do you like?” he asks, and then goes on, “It’s brand new.”

  “I can tell,” I say.

  “So, Neesey, what do you think of my new car?” he insists. He might as well grab onto the steering wheel and shake himself.

  “Iss like ridin in new spats,” I tell him.

  He laughs out loud but quietly, more a mutter than a ring. He has a dimple in his right cheek, off center and down. He glances at me sideways, I look back at him. He drives.

  I enjoyed that one moment, and then was sad again. I had good reason to be sad. The world did not look like Virginia anymore. Didn’t look like the country anymore. I could see stone buildings off to the sides, and more cars than would come near Patuskie in three years. The lines in the road were yellow and white, painted hard and straight. Harold had said we were driving west northwest now. There was moisture in the air. I thought it was the oceans, but Harold Grayson said no, we were driving away from the ocean. I kept quiet but I knew I felt wetness, and sure enough, just before Pennsylvania, we hit rain.

  Once he got going good, he talked and talked, all in my business. Glad you stopped crying. Must be real hard. How long you been with your grandma now? And how are Luke and David? You’ll like Detroit. Won’t you be glad to see your mother? She’s expecting another baby, right? Oh, what a blessing! What are you praying for, boy or girl?

  Had one conversation with him—trying to keep him company—and another one with myself. At his praying-for question, I broke off. I wasn’t praying for either, or neither. Hadn’t prayed for my mother’s new baby yet. Well, once or twice, before I left, I had prayed for no bitterness at being called back. Don’t know what I had thought really, had tried not to think too much.

  Harold’s talk crowded me, took me out of my own mind. Guess he was trying to distract me from my misery, had me half-pouting, half-lost, full of the vex of expectation. When he took a breather, I asked him a question. “How will I know if you fall to sleep, Harold?”

  He chuckled, “If I fall asleep, we’ll have an accident, Neesey.”

  “Well, what happens before that?”

  “What?” he says.

  “What happens when you fall to sleep,” I repeated, “before we have a accident?”

  “Well,” he said, “it all happens very fast.”

  I waited.

  “Maybe I swerve off the road,” he says. “Or maybe the car slows down to stopping and moves around the lane. I’ll nod,” he said, “it’s very dangerous.”

  He is so earnest, so grave.
Scrapple thick in my throat, I said, “Well, if you nod or swerve off the road, I’ll call your name.”

  “Loud,” I added after a minute, and smiled at how I raised my voice some, just then.

  “OK,” he said quietly, and commenced to being quiet. Good for Harold Grayson, to let me have some time. I knew I could touch his funereal training if I tried. Very glad for the quiet—and hoping it would last until we got there—I settled into my peace and pouting, and I watched the punishing road.

  HAROLD GRAYSON PULLED up in front of a two-family in Detroit’s cool night at eleven-thirty p.m. on the same day we’d left. The streets were paved and run over by cars, so there was no crunch of dirt, announcin us. All the houses had electric lights and the streets had electric too. The houses looked all to be large and they had more than one floor each. Once we got off the highway, we drove down big wide streets, where plenty other people were drivin too, many a them Negroes. Harold used his blinker signals when we turned corners; all the corners we turned reminded me just how much I didn’t know where I was, just how lost I would be, if I wasn’t sittin up in the car with Harold. I had to admit to myself I was glad the trip was over. We had drunk all the coffee: warm and then cool and then cold, and I was taut and awake like I’d been slapped.

  BIG JIM WANTS a girl baby. Margarete sent word of this to Granma’am, and ever helpful, Granma’am has sent me with a jar full of oil. There are petals three inches thick sunk through to the bottom. The oil is clear and viscous, thick. Its color has been shaped by the dried flower petals—whichever is the strongest—yellow, fuchsia, gray. Some of the medley I recognize as roses and hyssop, but I can’t tell what else. Other kinds of sopping leaves. I ask Granma’am. She tells me never mind. I am so drained what with the leaving and all. I can’t continue to try to impress on Granma’am about what things I need to know. Granma’am knows a little bit how I can’t stand not learning. She also thinks it’s up to her to decide what will help me or hinder me, in terms of knowledge. What news I’m ready for and what not. What if I later need to do the same thing for myself? Or somebody else? Doesn’t she think I should know? Why can’t she just tell me what flowers she soaked?

  But she doesn’t. And so again there is knowledge I have lost. I resolve to myself to ask again sometime. In the meantime I take the jar to Detroit with me like I’m told and I worry when the crust of fried chicken I am eating falls plink plink on its top. I am eating in the car as Harold Grayson and I ride through Ohio. I hurry to clean off the jar lid. I put my chicken down on the seat between us, and Harold scoots in the driver’s seat toward his door so that no grease gets on his pants. I wipe off the top of the Mason jar with a clean napkin, and Harold Grayson watches me with quick, sidewise glances. He tells me to set the jar in the back on the floor where the rest of the food is. He knows even less than I do. This is not food.

  Granma’am has sealed it securely. I study the skirt that the piece of plastic makes under the tight-screwed lid. I wonder very briefly if the skirt has to do with the girl baby this oil is supposed to help bring, and I decide to be more careful with the chicken. I hold the jar steady between my legs—I am wearing pants after all—despite Harold Grayson’s mildly disapproving sigh.

  I keep the jar of oil up front with me. I get the jar of oil safe to Margarete.

  MARGARETE’S HUGS AGAIN

  “IT’S THE BEIGE one,” he said.

  I strained my eyes to see beige. A woman at a second-floor window stood up. “Neesey, Harold?” the silhouette said.

  “It’s us, Margarete,” Harold answered, out of the car almost before it stopped, seem like.

  MY MOTHER CAME down and opened up the door for us. She stood at the well-lit foot of the stairs while we walked the concrete path to the door. I had left my grip in the car.

  Margarete, coming toward us, threw her arms out wide.

  “I lef my grip in the car,” I said, too soon and too loud.

  I turned to go back, but Harold caught me by the arm. “I’ll get it for you in a minute, Neesey.” That’s what he said, so I turned back around.

  My mother Margarete’s face had sunk. “Neesey?” she said. She looked hungry.

  I grinned, just to put some expression on my face. She liked that and held out her arms again. “I fo’got my grip in the car,” I said again more quietly as I walked into her embrace. I stretched very slightly over the baby in her belly.

  The little entryway was crowded with all three of us. Harold stayed behind me, in case I made a dash for my grip, I guess.

  “You so grown up, Neesey!” My mother held me slightly back to look. “How you like y’new pants? How was the drive, Harold? Neesey!” She hugged me again. “You so grown up!”

  “COME ON UPSTAIRS, you two,” my mother continued, as she turned to take her belly back up the stairs.

  “You goin to git my grip, Harold?” I turned to challenge him.

  “I’m going to get your grip,” he said. He went back out the door.

  My mother took my hand. So as she walked up the steps and asked me about our drive again, she pulled my arm along with her.

  “Come on upstairs, Neesey. What’s the matter?”

  “I’m waitin for my grip.”

  “Lord chile, will you let Harold bring that grip on upstairs? Come on,” she said and dropped my hand. “Everybody’s waiting.”

  Right away, I feel stronger with my limbs to myself. I follow her long skirt and low shoes, and I think again that I don’t really know who she is. I plan to keep my heart to myself because of it. Granma’am said that I’ll feel at home again soon. “You and Margarete will be a good team. You just wait and see,” Granma’am had said.

  Upstairs was my brother Luke edward with his sleepy eyes and ready smile and long legs stuck out in the floor like poles. And David. Steady Eddy. Mr. Regular. Still serious, and stocky, and just on the safe side of round.

  “Hey, See-David. Hey, you ole crazy Luke edward.” I couldn’t help but grin. I was glad to see them two.

  “Hey, Neesey, how you?” Their voices shock me, low like bears’.

  “Lemme look at y’all!” I say to them. The smile blazes in my voice. Dog, I think to myself, they men now!

  David is taller than Margarete; he wasn’t the last time I saw him. The both of them, David and Margarete, paper-bag brown. David looks so serious; is he sad? His face does not exactly agree with the Hey, Baby Sister he says.

  Granma’am say David was a focused boy, a child who wasn’t scared by study. David have good sense, she said. You better off like David, to be acceptin of the surprises of life and the Lord. When you handle the world that way, you grow joyful and watchful, instead a gettin full a frustration like so many. That’s what Granma’am always said, especially with respect to David. He such a watchful child. Down the country we called him See-David sometimes. It was affection made us call him that, and respect for the traits Granma’am named in him.

  Granma’am’s opinion about David caused me to watch him: first he would study, and then he would decide. I watched him watch Granma’am go outside every morning. Early in the day, she would go stand outdoors with her regular armor of busyness, with her litany of things to do. David said what she really went outside for was to feel the weather on her skin, to check on the flowers and the vegetable plants, and to stay familiar with the progress of the seasons.

  Granma’am was old all the time I really knew her, but David had seen her age. David told me that when he used to come to visit, when Daddy would sit him and Luke edward on the trains, that Granma’am would come to meet them with a big basket a sweets for Daddy and other things for Daddy to bring back to Margarete. He said Granma’am could walk fast then. He said Granma’am’s hands were straighter and smoother, and that she used a shaved stick to whiten her fingernails. He said Granma’am has not always complained about her knees; that sometimes she bent down and taught him and Luke edward how to play games she drew in the dirt. He knew Granma’am’s history and her habits late in life. So wh
en he visited one a the last summers he was there, he said he wanted to build a front porch. So that she would have a place to sit and watch spring grow green and hardy round the hills.

  Granma’am saved all the heavy work she could until summer, for David to do when he came. David always looked to help. When he got down home, he did all her heavy work first. Before the summer took over his life. He cleaned the shed. Painted the pickets and the screen doors their annual white. Washed all the venetian blinds that Margarete had sent for Granma’am’s windows from Detroit.

  He built some rickety trellises for Granma’am’s grapes one year. And afterwards, he thought he was a carpenter. Granma’am helped him believe it. They both talked about the grape braces, like it was Joseph the carpenter who built them. She was as proud as the mother of the child. Those braces had crumbled and Mr. Howell Jones had rebuilt them, sturdily, by the time Granma’am’s backyard was mine alone. Granma’am was so sad to see David’s trellises go. She saved one a his little strips a wood. For years after that, David intended to become a carpenter. To spend his days with aplenty electric power, and the floor a sawdust record of his work. He did end up working with furniture for a time, even though he wasn’t making none. And then he went to work at the plant in River Rouge, where there was a world of electricity and not much wood.

  Tonight, he wears a messy dark blue turtleneck with old gray workpants. He gave me a sweet kiss. I can still feel the brush of his parched lips at the far corner of my right eye. He only has to bend a little to kiss me because I have grown a lot. I have closed the gap that used to make me little to their big. His clothes smell like they’ve been packed away. I wonder if it’s so.