by Tayari Jones
The second-graders must have had some kind of party. There was wrapping paper everywhere and little bits of candy cane mashed into the floor. Mrs. Grier looked wore out like she had been working double shifts.
But still, when she saw me, she smiled. “Octavia! Merry Christmas!”
“Merry Christmas,” I mumbled back.
She straightened her back after bending down to pick up some of the wrapping paper. “What’s troubling you, Octavia?” Mrs. Grier always talks like a book.
I waited a second because I wanted to answer back with the same kind of words. But finally, I used my regular way of talking. “My mama say she sending me off to stay with my daddy.”
She smiled. “For the holidays? That’s lovely.”
“No. For ever. Or at least till they catch the child killer or till I’m too old for a child killer to kill.” I started moving the desks back into rows.
“Oh, I see.” She took off her shoes and stood in a chair to pull down a red streamer. “Where does your father live?”
“Orangeburg, South Carolina.”
“Oh? Is he affiliated with the university there?” She got down from the chair and sat in it.
“I don’t know.”
“Well, what does he do?” She looked kind of worried. “I don’t know of much industry in Orangeburg.”
“He teaches at a college.”
She sat up in her seat a little bit and smiled. I knew right then that she was going to side with Mama.
“What a wonderful opportunity.”
“Opportunity for what?” I crossed my arms over my chest. “I want to stay right here in Atlanta, Georgia.”
“Don’t stand so far away,” Mrs. Grier said. “Sit here. I want to tell you about when I was coming up.”
I sat down in the chair. She handed me a piece of foil-wrapped chocolate before she spoke.
“We were poor when I was a girl.” She looked at me with her eyebrows up, nodding her head a little bit. She didn’t expect me to believe her. And it was hard to picture. First off, it was weird to think that she had been a girl before. I tried to get it fixed in my imagination, but the best I could do was to get her real short. But even still her wavy hair was silver-white and cheeks hung low. The poor part was harder. Mrs. Grier don’t seem like she know where the projects are at, let alone that she used to stay there.
“My hometown is Sugarloaf, Alabama,” she said. “A town so small that there isn’t even a caution light to tell people when to get off the highway. There were twelve of us children, but only nine survived.”
“Kids was getting killed way back then?” I was shocked. The way people carried on here lately, I thought that child murdering was invented in 1979.
“No. Back then, many children didn’t survive infancy. One of my brothers died in his crib from a spider bite. The twin girls had whooping cough. All of this happened before I was born. My brother, Everett T, was murdered, but that was much later.”
“Twelve kids is too many,” I said.
“That’s the right attitude, Octavia.” She smiled. “Two is plenty in this day. But back then, children worked the land. We were a sharecropping family and Father was a proud man. He was determined to pay off the debt.”
“What about your mama?”
“Mother worked cotton too. She was strong, taller than father and nearly as broad. People never knew she was expecting until it was time for the babies to come. And they only knew then, because she took two days away from the field. One day for birthing and the other day to marvel at what she had done.”
Mrs. Grier stared out the window behind me. The merry-go-round and swing set reflected in her glasses. She was quiet as a library.
“Do you want me to clean the blackboard?” I asked, just so somebody would be saying something.
“That would be nice.”
I went down the hall to ask the custodian for warm water and rags. When I got back, Mrs. Grier picked the story back up.
“I was the youngest. My sister Livonia, who watched after those of us too small yet to pick cotton, made quite a pet of me.
“Every night Mother would tell us that she loved us. She might say, ‘Livonia, I love you like a cup of cool water. Everett T, I love you like the morning. Edna Lee’ (that’s my given name) ‘Edna Lee, I love you like a bunch of grapes.’
“I had never tasted grapes. But I knew they would taste like love. When I was in college, my roommate gave me some fat ones from the farmer’s market. I expected them to be bright purple like the pictures in the primer, but they were dark as Mother’s knuckles. When I tasted the sweet juice, I knew what Mother meant about love and then I bit into the bitter seed and I knew better. Do you understand, Octavia?”
I didn’t have no idea what she was talking about. My mama always gets the light green grapes with the seeds taken out already. “Yes’m,” I said.
“Mother and Father passed away on the same day. Father was a race man. He walked eight miles to Troy to get dry goods. There was a mercantile on our place, but the store in Troy was colored owned. Someone knocked him off the road as he walked back pulling the cart. He fell in a ditch and drowned in two feet of water.
“At the same instant, Mother put down her sack, complaining of a headache. She laid under a magnolia and died.”
I had the whole board wiped down but soon as it dried, traces of the chalk letters started showing through again. I dunked my rag in the water and started over.
“We children were separated. The older boys, Everett T and Burnett W, stayed behind. All the rest of us were sent, one by one, to live with relatives. My aunt Lee asked for me since my mother gave me her name. She came with Uncle James in a blue Packard and took me to Atlanta.
“I was just six years old, and had never ridden in a car before.”
“You was used to catching the bus?” I asked. Me and Mama always be on the MARTA.
“No, Octavia. We were sharecroppers. Everything we did, we did right on the farm. A plantation, really. Understand?”
I nodded and she went on with her story.
“So there I was in the backseat of the Packard. I didn’t realize we were moving. I thought that the trees whipping by the windows were passing us. After we were on the road an hour or so, I needed to use the lavatory but I was afraid to ask my uncle and aunt to stop the world so I could get out.” She laughed at this. Her mouth was the same pink as her fingernail polish.
I stopped rubbing the board and stared at her. Grown people love to tell the saddest stories and laugh about them.
“By the time we got to Atlanta, naturally, I’d had a little accident. Aunt Lee was angry. I burst into tears, not because I was about to be whipped but because Livonia had told me that Mother was always watching me from heaven.
“My aunt didn’t live in a mansion. The home I have now is larger. But to my Alabama eyes, it was amazing. Running water was some kind of miracle. I was scared to flush the commode.
“I shared a room with my cousin, Twyla, who is a few years older than I am. I had seen Twyla only once before when she came to Sugarloaf to meet us—her country relatives. We had all gathered in the front room. Twyla, who had never seen such a big family, whispered to Aunt Lee, ‘Mama, they have company.’ All of the adults had laughed and we children were confused. When I got to Atlanta, she was like a stranger.
“When night fell, I tried to climb in the bed with Twyla. I couldn’t imagine sleeping alone any more than you could imagine a single person eating an entire ham.
“ ‘Not in here with me,’ Twyla said, as though bed sharing was disgusting. I tucked my little head and went to the other twin bed. The pretty spread was butter colored and I was afraid that I might spoil it. I was as lonely that night as I have ever been in my life. But I didn’t cry because I didn’t want to wet the eyelet pillow slip.
“Somehow, I managed to sleep well that night. Drowsiness relaxed me and I spread myself all over that bed. Every time I moved an arm or a leg, I felt cool cotton. In a year�
��s time, I hardly thought about Sugarloaf at all.
“When my sister, Livonia, came to visit me four years later, I hardly knew her. By then, I was about your age. I saw Livonia like Twyla did, a country cousin that we both felt sorry for. I remember that she wore run-over brogans and a man’s belt around her dress.
“Livonia stayed for dinner. She wrapped her roll up in a paper napkin with a chicken leg and stuffed it in her bag. Before she went outside to wait for her people to pick her up, we had a moment alone. Livonia hugged me to her chest. I smelled the cocoa butter she used on her face and hands mixed with the chicken in her bag.
“ ‘I love you, Sister,’ she said to me. ‘Like a bunch of grapes.’
“I held on to her neck and did all the crying that I didn’t do that first night after I left Sugarloaf. Livonia gently pulled me free. ‘I gotta be going now,’ was all she said.
“I never saw her again.”
“What happened to her?” I asked.
Mrs. Grier rubbed the back of her neck and shook her head. “She stepped on a rusty nail and died of lockjaw.”
“For real?” At first I couldn’t figure out why she was telling me this story. But then I thought that maybe she was taking my side. She was telling me this so I could get Mama not to send me to South Carolina. I almost smiled, but I thought of poor Livonia with her jaws locked up. I rubbed that chalkboard with a straight face.
Mrs. Grier took a deep breath. “But that’s not the point,” she said. “While I stayed with Aunt and Uncle, I had to make myself useful. I washed all the clothes every day when I got home from school and ironed them in the morning before I left. Everybody in school admired Twyla’s clothes, but I was the one who had to iron in all those tiny pleats. I was the one with burned fingers from the curling irons I set her hair with twice a week.
“Oh, you should have seen me huffing and puffing under my breath about how things would be different if my parents were alive. I felt like a little colored Cinderella.” Mrs. Grier smiled.
“But didn’t you want them to still be living? Nobody wants for their mama and daddy to be dead.” I didn’t hardly know my daddy but I didn’t want him to be dead in the ground. And if something happened to my mama I’d probably just hop in the casket right along with her.
“You’re right, Octavia. I grieved for my mother and father. My brothers, sisters, and I have never again been under the same roof. I mourn that. But what I am trying to tell you is that I made myself useful in my aunt’s house and good things happened as a result.”
“What good things? They treated you like a maid. My mama said she ain’t sending me to South Carolina to be nobody’s maid. She said slavery times is over.” I crossed my arms again.
“Hush, child,” Mrs. Grier said. “I’m not finished. Your mother is right. Your father should not treat you like a servant. But I’m a little older than your mother, and I have had a few more experiences, so listen to me when I speak.
“Often people don’t do what they should. And if your father and your stepmother make you earn your keep, earn it. They won’t send you back if you make them need you. By the time you finish high school they will be obligated to sponsor your education.
“My aunt and uncle didn’t send me to Spelman College with Twyla. I went to Fort Valley State. But I took advantage of opportunity. I didn’t have money for movies and hamburgers like other girls, but I completed my teaching certificate just the same. I met my husband there too. He may not be a Morehouse man, but he works hard and we made a good life for ourselves. Understand?”
I still had my arms folded tight across me. “No.”
She got up from her chair and pulled my arms apart. Tugging on my wrists, she said, “Octavia, when you’re poor you don’t always have a choice.”
I wanted to snatch my arms away and tell her that me and my mama are not poor. We don’t stay in the projects. We stay across the street from the projects. But she let me go all of a sudden and gathered up her things.
“I’ll drive you home.”
We didn’t hardly say nothing while we were heading to the burgundy Cadillac. I was still mad about her calling me poor. But she didn’t even look over at me to ask why I had my lip poked out. Mrs. Grier was so far into her own head that she messed up three times trying to get her keys in the car door.
The inside of the Cadillac smelled like Christmas because of the little cardboard tree hanging from the mirror. Mrs. Grier turned on the radio and played the kind of music that don’t have words.
“Where do you live?” she asked.
“Down by Fair Street.”
Through the shaded car windows, everything we passed from school to my house was dirty brown like an apple with a bite out of it. People had their decorations up, but the stockings wasn’t red enough and the green of the wreaths was faded as old socks. A dog had knocked over a trash can, throwing empty egg cartons and tin cans every which-a-way. Running over it sounded like crunching a squirrel. I wanted to tell Mrs. Grier that a mutt was to blame. The people who live there put it in the can. They can’t help what a dog do. But I kept quiet.
“Right here,” I said, when we got to my building.
Mrs. Grier was looking out the wrong window to the project side of the street.
I tapped my window. “On this side.”
She turned, but her mouth was still bent into a sad clown line. How come she didn’t smile to see that I didn’t live over where she first thought I did? Probably because of the rainy-day windows. I followed her eyes to the flowerpot Mama and me put marigolds in last spring. The blooms were long gone. Now, it looked like a bucket full of dry dirt.
“Mrs. Grier, we had flowers in that pot before.” I had to tell her. “They not really dead. They’ll be back come spring, Mama say.”
She nodded like she understood, but the corners of her mouth bent down.
“Well, thank you for the ride.” I put my hand on the door. I wanted to get from behind the smoky windows. From where I was I couldn’t hardly tell my building from those across the street. Both were made of dirt-colored bricks with windows without cute shutters like in school-book pictures.
“Do you want me to go with you and tell your mother you were with me?”
“No ma’am,” I told her. “It’s not too late.”
I opened the car door. I thought that light was going to flood in from the other side of the glass, like when God speaks, but maybe everything had got dingy just that fast.
I turned around and waved at Mrs. Grier once I was on my sidewalk. Weeds grew bushy in the places where the concrete was broken up. In the spring there would be dandelion flowers there too. I thought maybe I should have hollered that to Mrs. Grier. But it’s not ladylike to holler. And dandelions are not much to talk about.
“Think about what I said.” Her voice was loud but not hollering.
“Yes ma’am. I will.”
Mrs. Grier waved and rolled up the window and watched me through dark glass until I went in my door.
Mama was sleep when I got home. She was stretched across her bed diagonal. One arm hanging off the edge, her fingers barely touching the rug.
“I’m here, Mama.”
“Okay,” she said. “Put the teakettle on for me, okay?”
“Alright,” I said, and went into the kitchen.
In the refrigerator was a plate of crackers and cheese but the cheese wasn’t cut into little chunks the perfect size for a Ritz cracker. I broke the hunk of cheese into smaller bits and ate a little of it while I waited on Mama’s water to heat up. Mama took some days off to spend time with me, but all she been doing is sleeping and sewing. She want me to carry all the Nikky dresses with me.
The teakettle started whistling.
“Mama, your water ready,” I said.
She came in wearing her blue robe. She poured the hot water over brown coffee pebbles. She stirred in some sugar and took a deep sip. I don’t know how she can drink that hot stuff without burning her mouth.
�
�Go and put on that pink dress. I want to make sure I got it pinned right before I sew it.” Her eyes were crusty.
“Mama, you going to wash your face?”
She nodded as she sipped.
“Why do I need to take that pink dress with me? I’m just going to be up there for a little while, right?”
“Right,” she said.
“So why I need all those clothes? And where I’m going to be going to need that many good dresses?”
“I just want you to have them. To let them know you used to nice things.”
“Cause she quality?” I asked.
“Who?” Mama said.
“Granny say Gloria is quality,” I explained.
“Mama just color struck,” Mama said. “Now go get into that dress.”
“When I get through trying on the dress, can I go outside?”
“For what?”
“Talk to Delvis.”
“Alright,” she said. “But you better be back in here before the streetlights come on.”
It was just four days before Christmas and nine days before I was supposed to be leaving and I didn’t even tell Delvis yet. I know I was supposed to tell him. Because when everything is counted up, he is my best friend. Almost my only friend. So I shoulda gone running over to tell him as soon as Mama told me. But something about it ain’t quite fair. Your best friend is supposed to be like your best friend out of all the friends that you might ever meet in the world, not just the best one you got right now, where you at. But still, I needed to tell him. It seemed like a lie for me to run around with him and the twins talking about what all we going to do next year when I know good and well that I ain’t going to be nowhere around here. Two times already, I meant to say something. Now I’m shamed of having waited so long.
I walked across the yard to his building. The wind was kicking and I didn’t have on my hood. I remembered it when I was on my stairs, but I wasn’t going to go back in my apartment until the streetlights came on.
Delvis snatched open the door before I even knocked on it.
“Come in and see,” he said.
