Silver Sparrow

by Tayari Jones

  “You did?”

  “I wanted us to be together someplace nice.”

  My mother said, “You sure are taking a lot of liberties for this to be Sadie Hawkins Day.”

  “Sadie Hawkins means that ladies get to ask the fel ows out on a date, but it doesn’t mean the fel ows just sit around twiddling their thumbs.” He smiled. His teeth were pretty and white like marble headstones.

  “Wel , let me have my Sadie Hawkins Day,” Mother said.

  “Let’s get engaged and then we can go to Paschal’s.”

  “What are you saying?”

  “Wil you marry me?”

  Clarence let go of my mother’s wrist, literal y giving back her hand, and rubbed his chin and the soft whiskers that were just starting to grow there.

  He looked out the window. My mother started getting nervous, wondering if she had overplayed her hand. There was much at stake besides just her heart and her pride. Her father worked for Clarence’s father and her relationship with Clarence had put her own father in a good position. And besides, if she didn’t marry Clarence, who would she marry? She was already a senior in high school.

  “Don’t you want me?” she whispered.

  Final y Clarence spoke. “Hel yeah, I want you. This just isn’t the way I thought this was going to happen. But okay, we can get engaged. We’re engaged right now. Okay?”

  My mother nodded, limp with relief.

  Clarence started the car and they drove toward Paschal’s.

  NOW, CLARENCE WAS long gone and she was again wearing the same homemade yel ow dress, not because she had come to like it but because the empire waist accommodated her changing figure. She was afraid to tel my father that she was four weeks late. Everyone knows that this is the hardest thing that you can ever tel a man, even if he’s your husband, and my father was someone else’s husband. Al you can do is give him the news and let him decide if he is going to leave or if he is going to stay.

  My mother was too frightened to speak the words, so she wrote them on a scrap of paper like a deaf beggar. As he read, the stutter raised in him so badly, he couldn’t even get out the beginning of his response. My mother reminded him how much he wanted a baby. Laverne had been lying beneath him for a ful decade, but she had not been able to give him what he most wanted. It had taken my mother only a few months. This baby was determined to be born, conceived despite al their caution. My mother told him that I was destiny.

  At last he said, “You’re giving me a son.”

  James sat on the porch swing at the rooming house and thought it over. She could see him processing it, going over it al in his head. He would think a while, and then look over at her — not at her face, but at her stomach, looking at me. Mother admits to feeling a little jealous. Al he was thinking was that he could final y get to be a daddy, that he was going to get himself a junior. He and Laverne had had a baby boy a long time ago, when they first got married. The baby was born feetfirst and didn’t even live long enough to take his first breath. James rocked on the porch swing, thinking that here came his second chance.

  While he was celebrating the idea that he could final y be a daddy, saying that he couldn’t wait to tel his brother, my mother popped the question.

  She said it in a playful tone, like she was inviting him out for an ice-cream soda. “James,” she said, “let’s go get married. Make an honest woman out of me.”

  Just moments earlier, he had been al motion, but now it was like somebody had pumped him through with embalming fluid. Final y he came out and said, “I am not leaving Laverne.”

  Mother knew he was serious because he cal ed his wife by her name. It made her remember her own father. When she had left Clarence, she knew her father was through with her because he said, “You’re no better than Flora.”

  When James said he wasn’t going to leave Laverne, Mother tried to act like he had misunderstood her, like she hadn’t been suggesting that they run away together and live life like normal people, giving me a chance at ordinary life.

  “Who said anything about leaving anybody? Marry me, too. Let’s drive to Birmingham, get married in Alabama.” Of course she knew the marriage wouldn’t be legal, but it would be something, better than nothing. Even an il egal marriage would save me from being a bastard. This was al she was thinking. Mother says it was Wil ie Mae who pointed out that getting him to marry her, making him a bigamist, a criminal, would give her something to have up her sleeve. But when Mother popped the question, she wasn’t angling. She was just thinking about love and about me.

  He sat, staring at her from the neck down, and he tried to say something. The stammer was real y bad back then. He bucked around like he was having a seizure or something and then he said, “For once in my life, I want to marry a woman who isn’t already pregnant.”

  My mother laughed at him. She couldn’t help herself. After al they had shared, he wanted to get al prissy, like he didn’t get to be a June bride.

  She said, “Wel , you need to stop lying down with women you are not married to.”

  The entire conversation took place on the screened-in porch of the rooming house. She should have taken him somewhere more private, but where did she have to go?

  When he walked away, al the other girls watched from the windows. She could see them lifting corners of the shades and looking out.

  Mother says it was like a slap in the face, but I don’t correct her. Abandonment doesn’t have the sharp but dissipating sting of a slap. It’s like a punch to the gut, bruising your skin and driving the precious air from your body.

  After my father drove away, Wil ie Mae walked out onto the porch and sat beside Mother on the swing. Mother knew then how disadvantaged her situation was, pregnant and by herself. And she knew how unequal life was that she was the one who got caught. James returned to his two-story house with a heavy heart, to be sure. My father is not a monster, but he stil had a home to go to and a woman there to fix his plate for dinner.

  MY MOTHER’S FORMER mother-in-law had given her a box of writing paper as a wedding gift. The stationery was lush rag cotton and engraved with my mother’s new monogram. The gift was two-handed; my mother understood immediately the spirit of it. The monogram was a genuine welcome — my mother was now a Yarboro. (When she left the marriage, she returned the fifty-year-old diamond but not her married name.) The second message of the gifted paper, clean in its cardboard box, was that she was now a woman of some stature, and such women wrote thank-you notes. Mother had already known this, as she had done wel in home economics, where she had also learned how to determine, while at dinner, the worth of a set of china.

  She had written letters of gratitude for the wedding gifts — lush linens, silver-plated spoons, and cast-iron skil ets that had taken the duration of her marriage to season. But she didn’t use the Crane stationery; instead, she rebel ed with floral patterned sheets purchased at Woolworth’s. The monogrammed paper went with Mother, unused, to her new life on Ashby Street.

  Sitting alone in her room, my mother took the box of paper down from her closet shelf.

  My mother’s father, my grandfather, was only about five miles away from Ashby Street. He lived off Edgewood Avenue, under the watchful eyes of the church women who pitied him for first being abandoned by Flora and then having poured so much of his life into a daughter who could be no more decent than her mother had been.

  When my mother didn’t receive a response to her letter by the first of the month, she suspected that the church women had destroyed it. Al her life, she had been uneasy with these surrogate stepmothers, dutiful and loveless. When she was about twelve, she accused them of intercepting Flora’s letters and birthday telegrams. Of course, the women denied the charges, and Mother final y understood that Flora had simply abandoned her. The church women were rigid but not cruel.

  Although the letter that Mother scratched onto her wedding stationery was short enough to fit easily on a postcard, it had taken four drafts to perfect. (The papers ruined with her
false starts stil rest in the box with the remaining sheets.) Dear Daddy,

  I am having a baby, and I want to come home.

  Love,

  Gwendolyn B. Yarboro

  The response came, final y, after nine days. The landlady handed it to my mother. She was a church woman herself, a deaconess at Mount Moriah. Not an unfeeling person, but she made it clear that she couldn’t have pregnant girls living in her place. Mother could stay as long as you couldn’t look at her and know what was going on. The same was true for her job.

  “I hope this letter is from somebody doing right by you,” the landlady said.

  My grandfather had written back on lined paper, a little sticky at the top where it had been pul ed from a notepad. He didn’t address her or sign his name:

  This is not your home. Wherever you are is home.

  When James final y returned, my mother was a different woman. It wasn’t just her body, inflated with me, that had changed. Her spirit was bloated and tender, too. She’d have to leave the rooming house in the next couple of weeks. Wil ie Mae had given my mother her life savings — rol ed coins and folded-over bil s. This money was hard-earned and smel ed like it. My mother’s own savings were meager, as she’d tended to spend most of her money at Davison’s, opening her pay envelope right there in the store and paying down layaways. She could imagine herself out on the street without even proper luggage in which to carry al her pretty store-bought dresses.

  When James rang, Wil ie Mae showed him up the stairs. This was against the rules, but Mother was soon to be expel ed, anyway. She was lying in bed, stil wearing her clothes from work. Only her feet were undressed. If Wil ie Mae didn’t come in every night at nine and force her to put on a gown, she would have slept just like that. Al those good dresses, straining at the waist.

  James came in the room, trailing behind Wil ie Mae with his hat in his hand like he was paying his respects to the dead. Lord only knew what Wil ie Mae said to him on the walk from the front door to the little room. He was looking like someone had taken him out behind the woodshed and beat him.

  And then right behind him came Raleigh, dressed the same as James. This was my mother’s first time seeing Raleigh, and for a second she thought he was a white man, and she wondered what kind of trouble she had gotten herself into.

  “This is Raleigh,” James said. “We were brought up together.”

  When she looked at him close, she could tel he was colored. She could tel , too, that Raleigh was a good man. Kindhearted. Tenderhearted, to be honest. For one quick moment, lying there in the bed in her wool crepe suit and panty hose, she looked at Raleigh and wished that she had met him first instead of James.

  JAMES KNELT BESIDE her bed. Wil ie Mae’s money rested in a cigar box wedged between my mother’s body and the wal . Wil ie Mae’s perfume, Charlie, col ided with the butterscotch melting in Raleigh’s mouth. James smel ed of clean cotton, aftershave, and menthol cigarettes. And there was her own sweaty odor, which was the same as the money’s.

  “Gwen,” he said, “listen. I have worked something out.”

  My mother didn’t answer, turning herself toward the wal with her body curled around the box of money.

  “Gwen,” he said, “I’m trying to do what’s right. T-t-turn your face and look at me.”

  My mother didn’t turn over. She wanted to hear what he had to say without worrying about how her face might respond.

  “Raleigh,” James said, “come here.”

  Raleigh moved toward the bed and folded his long, narrow self until he, too, was kneeling.

  It was the butterscotch scent that caused my mother to twist herself toward the faces of James and Raleigh. She could imagine how they had been as children — mischievous and inseparable and sometimes afraid. Gwen didn’t know it at the time but my grandmother, Miss Bunny, treated the boys as though they were a single being, beating and praising them in tandem, no matter which of them had sinned or excel ed.

  “Wil ie Mae?” my mother cal ed, wanting some al y. The connection between the men was like a living thing, like a fifth person in the room.

  “I’m going to go downstairs,” Wil ie Mae said. “I’l keep an eye out for the landlady. You don’t want her to catch you with the fel ows up here.”

  “Doesn’t matter,” Gwen said. “Don’t go.” But Wil ie Mae left anyway.

  WITH WILLIE MAE gone, the room seemed to be ful of men. “Can you sit up?” James asked.

  My mother, propping herself up against the pil ows, looked expectantly at James and Raleigh.

  “It’s nice to meet you,” Raleigh said. “I’ve heard good things.”

  My mother didn’t know how to respond to this, so she just nodded.

  James said again, “We worked something out, Raleigh and me. W-w-we . . .” He looked to Raleigh and nudged him.

  Raleigh continued the sentence. “We sold the Lincoln, got a good price for it. It’s in a check right here, made out to you. It’s on my account, but it’s from James. We just had to do it this way because of records, you know. But we are going to take care of you.”

  Take care of her! For a moment, she imagined herself to be like her former mother-in-law, whose only responsibility in life was to be beautiful and speak proper English. To be taken care of was to not worry about not having enough love, not having enough money. It was like James and Raleigh were offering her the chance to be someone other than herself.

  My mother looked to James, who nodded. “W-w-we want to do the right thing.”

  Raleigh handed my mother the check. It was plain sea-foam green, the sort you get free with your checking account. Her name was neatly printed across the line at the top, and Raleigh’s sharp, but not fancy, signature was on the bottom. The “For” line was blank.

  By the time she told me this story, the memory had gone bad like meat left too long in the freezer. She couldn’t remember the thril she must have felt at having her prayers answered so quickly, for the Lord to work in a way that was not mysterious but direct and clear. Tel ing me in 1986, she said, “Be careful what you wish for.” Now she can recal the tobacco odor of my father’s breath and the tang of his kiss. She remembers that Raleigh’s knees cracked as he was getting up. Wise with knowledge of the future, she wanted me to believe that she was apprehensive even then, but I knew she was lying. I envied her that moment. Who doesn’t dream of being rescued? Who doesn’t desire grand gestures?

  AT THE HOSPITAL, Raleigh signed my birth certificate, to save me the indignity of being a bastard on paper. Four months after I was born, my mother, my father, Raleigh, and Wil ie Mae drove to Birmingham, Alabama, where they stood before a judge in a county courthouse. My mother was surprised at how little was required to become man and wife. Not once did anyone ask if either of them was married to anyone else. Raleigh signed as a witness, as did Wil ie Mae. I was present for the ceremony, dressed in my white christening gown, the lace train draped over Wil ie Mae’s arms. On my mother’s night table is a framed photograph. Picture me there, smal and clean, proof that al that went on that afternoon was both holy and true.

  5

  HEART DREAMS

  BY FIFTEEN AND A HALF, I had become obsessed with my own heart. I dreamt about it several nights a week. Sometimes it took the form of a pear, bruised and slimy in the bowl of my chest. In another dream, it was anatomical y correct, pulsing with regular contractions. The only problem was that the valves were faulty; thick blood oozed out with every beat. These were the nightmares. Other heart-dreams were bright as summer. In one, my heart was a red-velvet cake, served by Mother on beautiful plates of polished silver. In a dream that was neither happy nor sad, the heart was a wine goblet, wrapped in a handkerchief and crushed under my shoe with quick mercy.

  I HAD A BOYFRIEND, Marcus McCready, and he was the secret center of everything. He was eighteen and, technical y, the things we did were il egal. I looked up the word statutory in the dictionary, but I didn’t find anything helpful. “Jailbait” is what he cal ed me, his
mouth sugary with Southern Comfort and ginger ale. “Who came up with the age of consent, anyway?” I asked him this, aware that the answer was unknowable and irrelevant. If I’d learned anything from my parents, it was that the law didn’t understand anything about what passed between men and women.

  To my mind, there was nothing not to love about Marcus. He was handsome and a little bit cocky sometimes, but I knew it was just an act. Al the posturing, the pimp-dip in his walk, the arrogant up-jerk of his chin — that was just to cover up his shame about his age. Marcus started school a year late because he had whooping cough when he was little, and on top of that his birthday fel at the start of the year. That made him a little bit older than the rest of the kids in his class, but it didn’t mean that he was slow. He was just born at the wrong time, which is something that could happen to anyone.

  The McCreadys were a good family. His mother taught music to grade-schoolers and his father was a tax accountant. Marcus Senior handled my father’s books, something I discovered quite by accident, but it gave me a thril to be so close to James’s real life. When Marcus’s parents had renewed their vows at Cal anwolde, my father drove the limousine at a reduced rate. His father cal ed mine “Jim.”

  We snuck around a lot, Marcus and me. When I passed him in the corridors at school, he looked away. After a month, I learned to shift my attention first. It wasn’t personal. It was just that Marcus had gotten into trouble the year before when he went to Woodward Academy, so he wasn’t supposed to run around with underclassmen. I slipped easily into my role as unacknowledged girlfriend. When you already had one secret life, what bother was it to have another secret within that secret? I even changed my appearance to exaggerate the effects of my doubly double life. For my everyday self, I gathered up my hair into two Princess Leia buns over my ears and stopped lining my eyes. I asked my mother to buy me black saddle shoes like Olivia Newton-John wore in Grease, but they didn’t make them anymore. I made do with penny loafers, wearing them with white socks, marveling at my chaste ankles.