by Tayari Jones
Whatever words I had disappeared because my mama didn’t cuss at me.
“I was at the park,” I said, but that was only half of it.
“What happened to your face?” Mama’s voice was high like Darlita’s.
“Nothing,” I told her fast. “I just fell; that’s all. I was up at the park.”
“At the park?” Mama grabbed me by my shoulders and shook me hard. “Don’t you ever go off like that again. I work too hard to have to be worrying about you. I didn’t know if you were kidnapped, somewhere raped, laying dead in a ditch.” Her fingers mashed my skin like dough. “Or with some boy.”
“But, Mama, it wasn’t like that.”
Then she hit me cross the face.
I tried to pull away, but she still had me hard by the shoulders. She put her face right up to mine. The white part of her eyes was crisscrossed with red. Mama’s breath in my face was strong like a whole pack of Kools. She shook me again and my head flopped back and forth like I was made of rubber.
“How many children got to die before you learn to bring your ass home?”
She slapped me again and had her hand back to give me another one. I opened my mouth to holler so maybe somebody might hear me and save me, but Miss Darlene came busting in, turning on the light.
“Yvonne! What you trying to do? Beat the child half to death?” She was looking at my face. Her eyes stopped on my chin. The blood drying there made my skin tight.
“Somebody see this girl and they’ll call the county on you. That what you want?” Miss Darlene shut our door.
Mama let go of my shoulders and put her hands on the side of my face. I was scared she was still crazy. But at least she was moving slow. Miss Darlene was shaking her head like me and Mama both need to be shamed. I didn’t really want Mama touching me, but I didn’t want Miss Darlene to see me scared of my own mama. So I stood stiff and pretended that I was on the roof of Rich’s and Mama was a little speck that couldn’t hurt me.
Mama touched my chin with her finger. “Sweet Pea.”
Miss Darlene gave a couple of clicks with her tongue like she was God’s secretary writing all of this down.
“I was already hurt. I fell on my face in the park.” And that was the truth.
Miss Darlene made the sound again like she was adding lying to her little list.
“For real,” I said.
Mama was looking at her hands like she never seen them before.
“You want Sweet Pea to stay over to my place till you get your act together?” Miss Darlene said. “What’s the point of carrying a child for nine months just to kill them when they get here?”
“Get out of here,” I said.
“Watch your mouth; I’m the one trying to help you.”
“I don’t need nothing from you. I told you my mouth was cut when I got home so get out.”
“Yvonne.” Miss Darlene looked at Mama, who was sitting on her knees on the carpet. Her head came up as high as my chest.
I kept my eyes on Mama too. I never talked crazy to a grown person before and I didn’t know what she was going to do. I ducked my head in case she was going to up and slap me again. But Mama just waved her hand like me and Miss Darlene was a couple of flies trying to spoil her picnic.
“If you need something,” Miss Darlene said, “you know where I’m at.”
I didn’t know which one of us she was talking to, but neither one of us said anything to her.
Mama pushed herself off the carpet holding her hands out in front of her like she had on wet fingernail polish. I wasn’t scared of her no more. I could see tears all over her like a hidden picture. Tears in her face, on her hands, swirled in her legs. Whatever had rose up in her was back down now. I couldn’t say that it was gone forever. She sat on the couch and I sat at the kitchen table.
The blood on my face was drying up. I picked at my chin and brown flakes fell to the table. I brushed them away and the table wobbled on its short leg. Mama hadn’t said anything to me since she tried to slap my face right off my head. To tell the truth, I really didn’t want her to. She the one always talking about she don’t believe in beating children. And then she didn’t even give me a chance to explain.
The phone rang. Mama didn’t move. It rang again.
“Want me to get it?” I said.
“Yeah,” she said. Her voice was as faded as her blue jeans.
“Hello,” I said.
“You back! Praise God!”
“Yes ma’am, Granny,” I said looking over to Mama to see what I was supposed to do. But she didn’t look up.
“You scared your mama half to death. And your granny too. I was fixing to hop on the Greyhound and find you myself. I need to call Ray and tell him you alright. Where were you?”
“I was at school doing extra work. I forgot to tell Mama.”
“That’s a shame,” Granny said. “That’s why Yvonne need to get you out of that city. People like to talk about us living in the country, but at least we don’t have to call the National Guard when a child stay a little while after to get her lesson.”
“Yes’m.”
“Now let me talk to Yvonne.”
Mama was still froze in her place on the couch.
“She in the rest room,” I said. “Want me to tell her to call you back?”
“Tell her she can call me collect.”
“Yes’m.” I wonder if Granny know she wasting her time every time she call this house. She can probably count every true word we ever said on one hand.
I hung up the phone and went back to the table. I kept rocking it back and forth like a loose tooth. The little taps it made was like a clock. It was about seven o’clock. I hadn’t had nothing to eat since lunchtime. Mama was still on the couch like a magician had hypnotized her and told her she was a rock.
She was still sitting out there when I came out the bathroom. Once I wiped off all the blood, I looked a lot better. My lip was split and meat was showing, but the rest of my face looked okay. Thank God, I’m dark. Light-skinned people are soft and show bruises easy. If a child go to school bruised, the teacher could call the county.
“Mama,” I said, hoping my new and improved face would make her snap out of it. The word came out funny because it hurt to touch my lips together. Mama turned in my direction and I hurried over the couch. “See, it’s better.”
“Sweet Pea, I’m sorry, baby.” She kept her hand in her lap. “Oh, look at your lip.” Then tears started rolling down her face. They kept running into each other and getting bigger and bigger.
I got mad again. I’m the one got pimp-slapped twice. My lip was swollen up bigger than JJ. I’m the one who didn’t have no dinner. And she sitting here crying like her feelings hurt?
She reached her hand out like she was going to touch my face. I jerked back. “Don’t touch me.” She snatched her hand back and I felt guilty. “It’s too sore.”
“I’m so sorry, baby.”
“You said you don’t believe in beating children.”
She let the air out through her nose. “I know.” She shook her head. “You scared me so bad.”
“But you didn’t let me tell my side. You just started shaking me and stuff.” Then out of nowhere my tears found their way out.
Mama put her arms around me and hugged me to her chest. Her body smelled like talcum powder. I took a deep breath of it before I pushed her way.
“You mashing my face. It hurts.”
She drew back and we did our crying on opposite sides of our couch.
When I got home from school, Mama had put the Christmas tree up. I know my life ain’t a TV show where they go out in the woods and chop down a tree and they put the ornaments on one by one saying “This one from Granny” and “Remember this special angel we got in Paris?” But still, me and Mama have this little thing we do. She is the one who puts the tree together, but I hand her the branches one by one and she lets me do the ornaments however I like.
But she snuck and did it by herself whil
e I was gone to school. I opened up the door and it was standing in the corner flashing on and off like the lights in a liquor-store window.
Mama was sitting at the kitchen table smoking cigarettes. The spearmint-smoke smell of Kools was like an old friend came back. Mama hadn’t touched her cigs in two weeks, since that day she slapped me across the face. She threw away the rest of the pack she had been working on and the lighter too, like it was the cigarettes that made her lose her temper, the same as whiskey makes people mean.
She didn’t turn when I opened the door. She kept smoking with her eyes closed like she was really concentrating.
“Mama,” I said, “you put the tree up?”
She nodded. “It’s December.” Her eyes didn’t look right. They were wet and swole like she was coming down with a sty, or maybe the pink eye.
“I woulda helped you with the tree,” I mumbled. “Like always.”
She carefully tapped her ashes into a bottle cap. “Sweet Pea, sit down and let me talk to you.” Mama touched the chair next to her.
I sat on the one across the table, the one Uncle Kenny ripped open with a bottle opener that was in his back pocket. We fixed it with some magic tape Mama ordered off the Channel Seventeen. The seam was supposed to be invisible but I could always tell where it was at.
“Ray called.” Mama looked hard at me, trying to see past my eyes into my brain.
“What he want?” I pushed up the edge of the tape with my fingernail. It was gooey like bubblegum.
“He wants you to come to South Carolina.”
“For the summer?” The tape was between my fingers now. I could snatch it all the way off if I wanted to.
She shook her head and sucked on the cigarette. The bottle cap was full already so she let the ashy part build up on the end. If I breathed just a little hard it would fall into her glass of orange juice.
“What for, then?”
“He wants you to stay up there for a good little while. At least until this mess is over.” Mama nodded over at a stack of newspapers. TERROR ON ATLANTA’S SOUTHSIDE. She said it like we know just when that would be. Like the child murderer called up Mayor Jackson and said, “Oh, I plan to stop snatching kids on the fourth of July,” or something like that.
“But, Mama,” I said. “They could be killing kids forever! Mayor Jackson’s already offering a hundred-thousand-dollar reward. Even still, kids coming up missing almost every week.”
Mama nodded her head like she was listening to me. “That’s true.”
I thought she was seeing my side. “And anyway, it’s just boys getting killed mostly. So ain’t really no reason for me to go away.”
Her ashes fell off into her glass. She looked down at it sad, like she had really wanted to drink that juice. “What about those two girls? I heard one of their mothers speak at the tenant meeting.”
“What she say?”
“She said maybe you should go on up to South Carolina with your daddy.”
“No she didn’t,” I said, easing more tape up.
“No,” Mama said. “I didn’t speak to her directly. But when she got through talking, I called Ray back and told him alright.” She put her glass up to her mouth before she remembered the ashes.
“But, Mama, I got things to do right here. I can’t just move to North Carolina.”
“South Carolina,” she said, like that made a difference.
“But what about my friend?” I said soft. “What if something happened? How I’m going to know about it?”
She made a confused face. “Delvis’ll be right here when you get back.”
“Not Delvis,” I raised my voice. “My friend what’s missing.”
Mama looked like she had forgot all about that. “I didn’t know you were that tight,” she said. She reached across the table like maybe she was going to touch me, but she didn’t. Her hand just stayed in the middle of the table.
It was hard to explain how I felt so close with someone after just a week. That’s how long me and Rodney actually talked to each other. So maybe we wasn’t best friends. But if we had more time, we coulda got tight. I could tell it was coming like how you can smell sweet rain on its way on a hot afternoon.
And if me and Mama was tight, she would already know how I was feeling. It would be like when I was little, and she could look at me when I was tired and say, “You sleepy?” just from the sight of me. Now me and her just getting looser and looser. Like when the elastic give out on the waist of a pair of pants. They just keep sliding off until you end up naked.
“We was friends, Mama,” I said. “I need to be nearby to find out what happened.”
“I’ll call you if there’s news,” she said.
But I needed to be there. Right there. Not just on the line. Ray lived on the other end of a phone and he wasn’t no daddy to me. How could I be a friend to Rodney from through the telephone? If God worked a miracle and found him safe, how could I be in South Carolina? And if he was dead, I needed to be there to see him buried in the ground. When Granddaddy passed away, they kept him in the funeral home for nine days while we waited for Uncle Edward to get train fare from Detroit. They said Uncle Ed needed to be there so he could rest. I asked Mama if they was talking about Uncle or Granddaddy and she said, “Both.”
“Maybe I could go and stay with Granny,” I said. Macon wasn’t too far away. “They not killing kids in Macon.” Granny reminds us about this every time she call over here. I yanked loose more tape.
Mama dropped the cigarette stump in the orange juice with a sizzle. She pulled out another one. “No ma’am. You not going to Macon. Last thing you need is to stay with Mama. She’ll have you sitting up in church all day, every day. Can’t nothing good happen in Macon, Georgia.”
“But you from Macon.” I had pulled the tape far enough back that the stuffing jumped out.
“That’s true.”
“Ray from Macon.”
“He not there now,” she said. “Your daddy ain’t crazy. He was out of Macon on the first thing smoking when we finished high school. He took his diploma like relay racers take that baton.” She turned her face to the ceiling and blew white smoke straight up.
“Where did he go?”
“College,” she said. “He used to write letters at first. Then after a while he just wrapped the money orders in a clean sheet of paper. No note.”
She smiled a little and shook her head, staring off at the Christmas tree. I was near enough to touch her. I smelled her soap and lotion. “Can’t I just stay here? I’ll be safe.”
She put her hands on my shoulders, like she was going to pull me into a hug. But she just squeezed my shoulders and spoke slow and careful.
“It’s more than just safety, Sweet Pea. Ray got things. He send money every month. That’s more than a lot of them do and I respect that. But what he really got, he can’t fit in a envelope.”
I thought she was talking about hugs, kisses, and mushy stuff. “I don’t need to go all the way to South Carolina for that,” I said.
“How else you gonna get it?”
“From you?”
She was tugging on her blue robe and something ripped. “I don’t have what Ray and them got. He teach at a college. If you staying with him, ain’t no way you not going to get to go.”
“Well, we live nearby to a college, right here.” I passed the iron gates of Spelman College every time we walked to the store.
Mama touched her side through the hole in her robe. “Sweet Pea, look at me.”
I turned my face in the right direction but locked my eyes at the Christmas tree behind her head.
“Octavia.” She called my given name.
I looked at her face for real this time. The hot-comb scar on her forehead was healing up bright pink. I watched her lips red with lipstick and brown from smoke.
“Ray wants to give you something real. It’s a shame that fourteen kids had to die before he offered it. But now he got his hand out and you don’t have no choice but to grab it.�
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But there was too a choice. All she had to do was call Ray and say No way José. You not taking my baby. And then Ray would be the one with no choice but to back up.
Mama didn’t unplug the Christmas tree before she went to work. It flashed on and off like a silent alarm. I put my hand on the TV to cut it on, but then I changed my mind. I was tired of dead kids, search parties, and reward money. If I never saw Monica Kaufman again, it would be too quick.
And I was mad at everybody I ever met in my whole life. Mad at Jashante for bringing bad luck to our neighborhood. I was mad at Mama for putting up the stupid tree by herself, for handing me over to Ray like a two-dollar gift swap. And she the one who sent Kenny away. I kicked the Christmas tree and one blue glass ornament landed near my bare foot. The lights kept up the on and off. I wanted to pitch a real fit like white girls on TV, throwing dishes against the wall, hollering and cussing between each crash. If I was a white girl, I would chuck a cereal bowl across the kitchen, cussing at Kenny for getting himself kicked out, for putting his hands everywhere when he tickled me. I might break a whole shelf of glasses screaming at Rodney for sharing his candy with me and getting hisself snatched two days later. And last I would destroy Mama’s green punch bowl, cussing at myself for being too stupid to see that nothing lasts. That people get away from you like a handful of sweet smoke.
I turned my eyes to the ornament on the floor. I put my foot on top of it. Lightly. The bottom part of my foot bent easy over the curve. I pressed down a little bit. The glitter scratched the soft space on my sole. Then I pushed with my whole weight. The glass broke with a solid crunch. It wasn’t the same as destroying a whole cabinet full of china, but it was enough.
It hurt. I hopped on one leg to the couch and examined my foot. It was dark in the room except for the Christmas lights, but I could make out a piece of blue glass sticking out. I pinched it with two fingers and yanked. The blood came then.
Walking carefully with one hand on the wall, I limped to the bathroom to tend to the wound I could see.
Sometimes, I have too much on my mind and I need somebody to help me think about it. On the last day of school before Christmas, I went down to the second-grade class to look for Mrs. Grier.
