A Kind of Freedom

by Margaret Wilkerson Sexton

  “I knew he would like you,” Evelyn said.

  “I know. I should have believed you, but I was so nervous. Imagine if he hadn’t. You’re the most important person to me. I couldn’t live if I couldn’t have your hand.” He kissed her in front of the house the way she’d always wanted, but Evelyn pulled away, feeling someone somewhere was watching her.

  Once he was gone, she walked back up the porch steps. She could hear her parents arguing from the door.

  “But did you see his shoes? And did you hear what he said about where he lived? Twelve brothers and sisters. Can you imagine? For our daughter? And in a house on Amelia Street the size of a shack? He’s a low-class man, Josephine. Not middle, middle I could take, I could do something with it, but low.”

  Then her mother’s long silence, its heaviness breaking: “I thought that was endearing to tell you the truth. Piti a piti, zozo fait son nid. Don’t tell me we’re up so high we can’t reach our hand out to someone below us.”

  “It’s not that I won’t reach my hand out, don’t you say that. You know I do more to lift our people than most. The New Orleans Urban League, the Black Savings and Loan Association, you know how many free medical exams I gave out last year alone? Do you?” As his voice lifted, her mother’s seemed to cower.

  “I’m not saying you don’t.”

  “I just don’t want to waste all our effort, and on what, an unlikely prospect. Think about your daddy. What would he say?”

  “He would say to give a young Negro man a chance.” She paused. Then, “Not everybody gave you a warm welcome either, you know.”

  “I was a doctor.”

  “You were becoming a doctor just like this boy.”

  He raised his voice now. “I was from a good family, you were lucky to end up with me. And I’ve done well for you and the kids.”

  “That’s what I believed too.” She seemed to walk over to him then. “But I’m just saying everyone didn’t agree with my assessment.”

  “Josephine, if I didn’t know you better, I’d think you just wanted her out of the house, that you didn’t care who she ended up with, as long as she was gone from here.”

  Mother didn’t say anything.

  “Or maybe it’s more than that. Maybe you don’t want to see Evelyn come out with a better match than Ruby.”

  Evelyn heard the scrape of a wood chair against linoleum, and her mother’s house shoes batting against the floor.

  “You say what you want, Nelson.”

  “You know I will.”

  “You say what you want,” her mother repeated. “You think you know everything, but one thing you can’t know is how much I love that child. You didn’t carry her, nor did you push her out. You’re a mighty good provider, but you didn’t learn her how to eat with a spoon and tie her shoes and write her first word, and for those reasons alone you can’t know.” Her voice broke. “My love for her took over when I had her. There’s no room for anything else.”

  Evelyn’s daddy’s sharper heels tapped, then stopped.

  “Well, I love her too, and I won’t have her fighting her way through this life. It’s already hard enough. I won’t make it harder, I can’t. I promised myself that.”

  Jackie

  Fall 1986

  Jackie didn’t blame Terry for leaving her; mostly she just worried she would get a call one morning that he had been arrested inside some crack den, or outside it, stealing to support the habit. He was by no means a thief, but Jackie had learned the hard way that life could drag disgrace out of you.

  No, she didn’t blame him, but on her bad days resentment jabbed her from the inside. Today was a bad day, she knew, because she hadn’t even turned on her Chaka Khan when she got into the car. Instead, she stared outside as she jerked her beat-up Camry out of Stately Grove. She had to keep her windows down because her air conditioner had broken a few months before in the dead of summer, and she could reach out and touch the soiled mattresses beside the dumpster if she tried. No, there was nothing stately about this apartment complex, this neighborhood. Still, she studied her surroundings while she drove in to work, forced her body to feel the potholes, let her eyes linger on the boarded-up houses, liquor stores, and bail bondsmen. Billboards dotted every corner: Nancy Reagan leaning into a black child’s face, bold white letters above her head. just say no.

  At the light, Jackie even peered through her rearview at the housing projects behind her, covered in graffiti and littered with trash. There were at least ten police cars parked in the vicinity already, and residents who should have been at work seemed to guard the overgrown grass, the slumped brown brick towers. In her old neighborhood, her lawn was as fresh as first-day-of-school haircuts, and she could have slept on her sparkling green grass all night without being bothered if she wanted to. But that had been a house in New Orleans East, with patio furniture in the yard, even room for a pool once T.C. got older, and things were different now.

  She felt herself exhale as she pulled onto I-10 east, reached the exit for Chef Menteur Highway, slid into the version of heaven where she and Terry had built their first home. The East had been the promised land for the black middle class. It was swampland until the ’60s when developers drained it to make room for homes. Black lawyers, doctors, bankers, and even teachers settled in the small pockets of colored housing. Then in the ’70s the white neighborhoods became fair game. It was the lawyers and doctors who integrated first, but just ten years later, her middle-class parents secured enough of a down payment to pluck the corner house on Lake Forest. It wasn’t long before she and Terry moved a few blocks away.

  Now she drove down Chef, which bustled with schools and shops, beauty salons, clothing stores, Bessie’s Dog Boarding, Inez’s Beauty Supply. She turned onto Lane Avenue, a residential street with new brick houses, iron lions guarding its fronts. The neighborhood was quiet by this time, carports emptied, curtains drawn; most everybody worked, except the occasional mothers who stayed home to walk their children to school.

  Jackie parked in front of the house on the corner with the baby-blue trim. She stepped out of the car, lifted T.C. She strained under his weight, though it made her proud that at six months, he was more than twenty-five pounds. It was only eight thirty in the morning, but she could hear the infants and toddlers shrieking before she reached the sign: action academy in bold red letters above the front door. She walked inside, sidestepped the babies upright in high chairs, grits dribbling down their chins. Once she dropped T.C. with her Aunt Ruby, she climbed upstairs to the Dwarfs Room, the toddler class she’d named after “Snow White.” She had wanted to keep her baby with her, but her daddy had said it wouldn’t be good for business, that the customers would think she was favoring her own child and start to look for signals of it, unchanged diapers, dirty faces.

  “But you know I wouldn’t favor T.C. over anybody. I treat them all like they’re my own.”

  “I know that. But you know how these new mothers are, any excuse they can think of to complain. They’re mad they can’t mind their own children, so everything becomes our fault.”

  Jackie had argued with him a little longer, but he’d had the final word because he was probably right; he always was, wasn’t he? Anyway, what was she going to do? Quit with a newborn, no child support, and rent due? She hadn’t gone to law school like her sister, Sybil, and, yeah, she graduated from Xavier, but she’d applied for seven jobs after college and never got past the interview phases. She’d come home excited after each one, told Terry they went great, and he’d massage her with excuses each time they didn’t work out: They probably went with someone they knew, or They might have been racist. Finally, after seeing her hurt so many nights, he suggested she stay home. That had been before his layoff, before the drugs, back when he made enough to take care of them both.

  Upstairs, the kids in her class attached themselves to every inch of her body as she walked through
the door, syrup from biscuits on their hands and now her skirt. They almost made her forget her chronic grief, the guilt that tugged at her heart because despite everything Terry put her through, who knew what trouble he was in right that minute? Maybe she should have fought harder for him to stay.

  She knelt beside the table where the kids ate. The talkers had already started, an avalanche of words that wouldn’t let up until nap time, and that was what she loved most about her job, how it swept her so thoroughly out of her real life, how the freshness of each moment kept her wrapped inside it. Even now, a boy named Carter was reciting the ABCs; then, without stopping, pulling her face to his, he said, “Puff was sad.”

  “Puff?” Jackie answered.

  “Puff, the magic dragon, he was a little sad. When his friend left. He was a little sad.”

  “Oh,” Jackie said. She had read the book yesterday. “That’s right, but didn’t he feel better when his new friend came along?”

  “I’m a little sad,” the boy said this time.

  “Oh, no.” Jackie moved to hug him, though she could see the poster of emotions in her periphery. They’d gone over them earlier this week, and since then her toddlers would pick a feeling without warning, cling to it the whole day, clutching anger or sadness, and she’d think, You don’t know what sadness is.

  “His friend came back; his friend came back!” the boy exclaimed suddenly. “Now Puff’s a little happy.” He kissed her on the cheek.

  During naptime, she went for T.C., carried him back upstairs to nurse. There was a TV in the back room and Jackie had snuck an extra helping of her mama’s butter beans up from the main floor. Sometimes Mama would join her in here and they’d watch The Phil Donahue Show. Jackie turned it on today, but she barely glanced up—one woman from the audience said she would sacrifice getting married and having babies for a thriving career. Sybil said things like that too, but Jackie knew she didn’t mean it.

  She lifted T.C., slipped her full breast in his mouth, pressed him up against her, inhaled his newborn freshness from the top of his head. She loved watching him nurse. These days most women preferred the formula. Breastfeeding makes your boobs sag, Sybil had warned her. You trying to get a new man, right? But Jackie couldn’t imagine herself with someone new. In the beginning when Terry would show up still seeming like himself, all showered and shaven and good-hearted, only a fraction short of the pharmacist she married, she would cater to him as if he were still her husband. But now, she never let him in her bed, just tossed a blanket on the sofa. Sometimes she stood in the hallway and watched him. Once he was so paranoid he paced the room for hours, but another time he just slept for almost a full day. When he woke up that time, he asked her to bring him a po’boy from We Never Close. She drove all the way to Chef, stood in the line and everything, but by the time she got back, he was gone.

  The last part of the day at the nursery always seemed to rush by. Once the children woke up from their naps, Jackie and the other teachers marched them around the neighborhood; while they were gone, Mama prepared their snack, usually Cheerios or pretzels. Then they’d congregate in a circle and read Green Eggs and Ham or sing rhymes Jackie and her sister had danced to as children:

  Down, down, baby, down, down, the roller coaster

  Sweet, sweet, baby, I’ll never let you go

  Afterward the teachers cleaned up, urging the kids to stack the books in the shelves themselves and pick up their own Legos. When the last child was gone, Mama and Aunt Ruby would change into their nylon tracksuits that swished when they walked and collapse at the kitchen table.

  “That lil’ Jennifer seemed to be doing better, don’t you think?” Mama asked now.

  “Umhmm,” Jackie nodded, though she thought the child whined more than normal. She flipped through Ebony for pictures of Whitney Houston. People had told her she looked like a light-skinned version of that woman, and Jackie had come to agree.

  “I think it’s ’cause her mama’s putting her to bed earlier,” Mama went on. “That’s important, you know. With you girls I kept you on a schedule.”

  “It was too much,” Aunt Ruby interrupted, shaking her head. “I couldn’t get Evelyn to do a thing unless I went to her house and sat up on her porch. She couldn’t go shop, she couldn’t eat out. All that and she only had two kids. What did she need to schedule them for? You blink and you forget they’re even there. Now, me, I didn’t keep a schedule but I still had my seven under strict control.”

  “No, I guess I didn’t need to,” Mama cut in. “Jackie and Sybil were nine years apart; by the time Jackie came along, Sybil had been in school for years, could run the house by herself if I needed her to, but children need structure, and if you don’t give it to them, they act a fool seeking it elsewhere. Then before you know it, there’s a crazy boyfriend in the picture, or worse, drugs . . .” She trailed off.

  Jackie knew she hadn’t meant to use that example.

  Then Mama turned to Jackie as if she were seeing her for the first time that day. “What’s the matter, Jackie Marie? You seem a little down.”

  Jackie shook her head. “Nothing, Mama.” She plastered a smile on her face. “I’m just tired, that’s all.”

  “The baby kept you up?” Mama asked. “Well, that’s normal for his age,” she answered before Jackie could. “But in a few months he’ll be sleeping through the night, you watch. Both my kids did by nine months.”

  “My jokers still don’t sleep through the night, and the oldest will be twenty-nine tomorrow.” Aunt Ruby cut her head back and laughed, a shrill tinkly number.

  Jackie and Mama just smiled.

  “Well, you’d have them out all hours, then wonder why the feel of their mattress didn’t put them in the mind for rest,” Mama said.

  “Well, I had to work.” Aunt Ruby’s voice began to rise. “I had to provide a steady home. Must be nice to have a—”

  “Chasing men,” Mama muttered.

  “What?” Aunt Ruby jerked her head up.

  Jackie didn’t even look up from her magazine. When it came to her sister, Mama couldn’t be without her, but she couldn’t say a positive thing about her either. Times like these it was best for Jackie to just nod.

  Her daddy walked in the room then, wearing the same tracksuit as Mama, only its stripes were blue instead of pale green. Sometimes her parents were so in sync it made her sick. He squeezed Jackie’s arm. “You okay, princess? You seem a little down.”

  “I said the same thing, Renard, but it’s just that she’s tired. You didn’t get up with those babies, so you don’t remember, but I remember. Oh, I remember,” Mama added.

  Then they began to bicker in their sweet way about who got up when, and Jackie shut out their sounds, asked herself the same questions they had. What was it that had come over her, a darkness of some manner? Of course she’d been this way when Terry first left, but she’d been steadily improving, and she didn’t know what it was about the day that made her feel like every evenness she’d regained was being snatched back, that she was doomed to a certain and dark fate, that that fate was upon her even now and she could barely walk through it, it clung to her so thickly.

  The door to the nursery opened, and Jackie heard her sister’s heels clacking against the hardwood floor, smelled her Armani perfume before she saw her. Since Jackie had started working at the nursery a few months earlier, she and her parents and sometimes Aunt Ruby ate dinner together every night. Nothing fancy, whatever Mama had prepared for the kids’ lunch, spaghetti with sausage and meatballs, red beans, beef stew or cabbage and rice. Jackie had dreaded those meals at first. Her depression wanted to extend itself, wanted to strap her to her couch at home eating TV dinners in front of Murder, She Wrote, but it was those meals with her parents that had brought her back to her own. They didn’t talk about much: layoffs, what the Saints might do next season, but it was more the chemistry of them together, the soft rhythm of it th
at reminded her so thoroughly of her time as a child that she could convince herself her biggest problem was whether she’d learn to fishtail her doll baby’s hair before her playdate with Lucita McConduit.

  Now her sister was here with her waxed eyebrows, red blush, and pink lipstick, her shoulders pushing through the top of her business suit, and her pumps making such a racket Jackie was certain she’d wake the baby. Jackie looked down at her own washed-out sweatshirt and faded jeans. She was still looking down when Sybil kissed her on the cheek, which in itself felt condescending. They didn’t do that with each other. It was likely something she learned from one of her law school friends, and it was all well and good when Jackie had her man beside her, certain Sybil would study herself into a lonely oblivion, but now they were both alone, and Sybil’s alligator bag probably cost Jackie’s rent.

  “Where’s my baby?” Sybil scanned the room looking for T.C. and Mama had to shush her. “He just went down. Let Jackie Marie have a break.”

  “He’ll be up after dinner, wanting to eat what I eat,” Jackie chuckled, and Sybil wrinkled her nose as if Jackie had told a tasteless joke, or farted.

  “What a nice surprise.” Daddy walked back in from washing up and hugged his oldest daughter.

  Sybil’s face lit up when she saw him. “I got off early and knew you’d be here,” she said.

  “Good. You deserve a break. Well, stay for dinner, darling. Mama made some butter beans and salad, didn’t you, Mother?”

  Mama just nodded. She had already laid the plates out in the kitchen and added another setting before they said a quick grace. By the time Jackie was halfway through her meal, Sybil still hadn’t spoken, and Jackie prayed the rest of the dinner would pass that way. She knew Mama had made Jackie’s favorite that morning, bread pudding, but she was willing to forego it to skip out on a conversation with her sister.

  Sybil cleared her throat. “I have some news.”

  “Oh, Lord, are you pregnant?” Aunt Ruby asked.