by Maxine Clair
“Why were you talking about it in the first place?” Vergie wanted to know.
“He wanted to know where he came from—somebody had said something to him, I guess.”
Bad choice of words. “So you told him to ask me where he came from. You couldn’t just say you didn’t know? Why didn’t you tell him what I told him? He’s too young to understand about babies—you ought to know that. What were you trying to prove?”
“Nothing,” October said. “Vergie, I swear, I just told him to ask you everything. I might have said that I didn’t know about God and all that.”
“You promised me you wouldn’t tell him,” Vergie said, and she started to cry. “You said you wouldn’t.”
“I didn’t,” October said, going to her, trying to touch her, calm her down. “It wasn’t about us and David—it was just a question about where babies come from.”
Vergie blew her nose. “You had no business talking about it to him. You knew what you were doing.”
“I’m sorry, Vergie,” October said. “You have to hear me when I tell you—David doesn’t think anything. He’s a boy, that’s all.”
“I’m sorry, too,” Vergie said. “You gave me your word, and I thought I could trust you.” She was calmer now, wouldn’t look at October.
“This is the last time,” Vergie said.
October didn’t know what she meant. She didn’t remind Vergie that the promise had been a little bit different from the way Vergie remembered it. But it didn’t matter. She had said nothing. Neither one of them seemed to have anything else to say. Vergie stepped away from the door so that October could get out. When October opened the door, Vergie said, “If I ever leave you with David again, I hope God will strike me dead.”
Vergie was like thin china right then. October knew that. They had taken her womb and David had spent too much time with October. She could understand that too. She didn’t want to fight but she wasn’t about to leave with that curse over her head. She didn’t want to pull out the big guns, but she could if Vergie forced her.
The next morning she waited until Gene was gone and David was on his bike before she found Vergie in the den, looking at The Price Is Right.
She didn’t even sit down, had to stand up to say what she had to say. “Vergie,” she said, waiting to get her attention. When Vergie’s eyes didn’t leave the TV, October went and stood in front of it. Bob Barker was loud in the background, but October was louder.
“You said I broke my promise. I didn’t. But here’s another promise.”
“Shh!” Vergie said, looking around for David. October switched off the TV.
“I don’t have anything else to say,” Vergie said.
“I do,” October said. She said it soft, but she was mad. “If you ever try to keep me from seeing David, I will tell him everything. That’s my new promise, so don’t go threatening me.”
“When you tell him,” Vergie said, “just be sure you get it right. I want to see you tell him you didn’t want him. Tell him that and see what happens.”
October retreated. “You heard what I said.”
She left to go pack her things. If it took all she could muster, she wouldn’t run. She would stay until Saturday, give David his little present Friday night. Vergie could like it or lump it.
Friday night she left the present on David’s bed, wrapped in tissue paper in a little white box. He came to Aunt Maude’s old room to tell her thank-you. Stiff. Worried.
She took that moment to hug him good-bye. “Don’t worry,” she said. “Everything is going to be all right. Me and Vergie get like this sometimes.”
And then Saturday. Sour good-byes were the easiest. Nobody was supposed to care.
The car was all packed, and still, Vergie didn’t come downstairs. Gene and David had helped, and Gene kept looking up at the bedroom windows, wondering if Vergie’s face would be there. It wasn’t.
October kept hoping too. Suppose something happened to one of them. Watching David carry her hatbox to her car, knowing it would be months before she saw him again, though, hope turned into so much fluff. Down in her somewhere, even if they never spoke again, she wasn’t about to let Vergie keep David away from her for good.
When it was finally clear that that was that she hugged David and got into her loaded car. As she pulled oft, Gene waved, and David did too. In her rearview mirror she watched them waving until the two of them were a snapshot that would last for a long, long time.
PART TWO
chapter 18
Storm warning. Shaky ground.
When David was born, I did what was mine to do. I stood faithfully by and held for Lillian and him. And when she and Vergie started knotting up the thread between them, I held. When Frances was trying to make it back through the narrow passage, I stood and held for her, too. The same for Maude.
Lillian and Vergie were last and all to each other. When they made it their business to start tearing that apart, holding for them was mine to do, and I did it. But mothers and fathers owe their children; I always believed that. And Franklin and I ended up owing our girls more than most.
It was true that my last breath was a prayer and prayers get answered. Still, I did all I could to help them be open to whatever grace might come their way.
chapter 19
Leon Haskins. Back in 1951, when he set his sights for Harlem, he didn’t know beans about what he wanted.
All he knew was that Kansas City jazz days were over and the New York City scene was it. If he climbed out of his bed one day and found himself in Harlem, he thought he’d be set from then on. Coming from the Show Me state to the Apple, he would be one of the future kings.
After all, Coleman Hawkins had spent a whole lot of time in Kansas City, and he was Leon’s first idol. Leon had other idols too: Lester Young, Ben Webster. Kansas City had grown them up and sent them like exotic seeds on the wind to swing-jazz fame.
And Charlie Parker. Bird. Leon knew the legend. How Bird had been to the woodshed behind his mother’s house on Olive Street, taken off from there, and soared on flawless improvisation to his perch as the genius of modem jazz. And when Leon had gotten to Harlem, already Bird’s imitators could be heard in every club that had a bandstand.
Late bloomer. That’s how Leon saw himself. He was twenty-six then. Bird had been crowned king when he was twenty-two. Dizzy was older, but better longer. Miles Davis had just broken away and done something mellow, mournful, cool. Leon could list the players not much over thirty yet but at the top of the heap, recording with everybody.
Leon had two recordings to his name. Sideman recordings with nobodies. The trick, as Leon saw it, was to make something out of his Kansas City-ness. He gave himself a year to segue into his own style, the sound that would set him apart from all of them. Little did he know that this kind of determination was the very essence of what had lifted jazz to its lofty place.
And so, with his horn under his arm, Leon had stepped out of his furnished room on the third floor of an old Harlem tenement, skipped down the stairs and out the front door onto 119th Street, a valley that stretched across Harlem from Momingside to Kingdom Come.
That was September 1951. By September 1952, he had gotten his big break. An overseas tour with Lionel Hampton’s band. And he had opened for Dizzy Gillespie at a nightclub in the Bronx. On his way. He had met his “family,” as he called it, an old blues-player man with a common-law wife and a borrowed daughter.
If anybody had told him then that in six or seven years he would tuck tail and flee back to Kansas City, he would have laughed.
chapter 20
If ever she was to have David sleeping under her roof in any form or fashion, October thought she would have to set Vergie’s words aside and get busy. Step one, find a house, because her little apartment didn’t offer anything but plain shelter for a child. Even for a visit, David would
have to have his own room. And a place to play. And children to play with. All of that.
Tim Crawford, the real estate man, with his busy self, told her he would do what he could but not to get her hopes up for as good a deal as Cora and Ed had gotten. She told him she wanted to be in a house that had been around for a while, in a neighborhood near enough to school. Nothing less than two bedrooms and a real dining room. Aside from that, a basement and a backyard would be nice. Donetta and Kenneth also lived on the west side, where all the blacks were moving in. Between them, and Cora and Ed, October figured surely she would find something.
Meanwhile, eight-thirty to four found her doing what she was paid to do. For the moment the school was short-handed. With desegregation pressing, some of the best teachers were being sent to the front lines at white schools, leaving larger classes at the Negro schools to be handled by the unchosen few. October was one of them.
At school, the morning’s second bell always sent the children skedaddling out of the hallway and into their classrooms before the teachers closed the doors. She and Donetta had classrooms across the hall from each other. She had third-graders; Donetta had sixth-graders, some of them just beginning to smell themselves, believing that that gave them permission to act ugly.
October had just begun to call the roll one morning when she heard somebody—a child?—talking way too loud in the hallway. She looked out the window in her door to see Donetta across the hall, talking to a boy who was as tall as she was. And the boy had his hat on inside. She saw Donetta closing the classroom door and the boy trying to open it again.
She opened her own door. “What’s the problem?”
Donetta looked like she had swallowed fire. “Somebody is about to get his hand slammed in the door.”
At that moment, the boy yanked the door open and tried to get in past Donetta.
“What do you think you’re doing little boy?” she said. “Come on.” And she took him by the arm, ushering him to the principal’s office.
At recess, she and Donetta had playground duty, and October told Donetta her story of being falsely accused once for just such a scene.
“I wish his mother would come to school,” Donetta said. “I have a thing or two I’d like to say to her.”
Things had changed. Used to be parents were right there, lockstep with the teachers. Not anymore. The teachers were on their own. Which reminded Donetta—she wanted October to come to a club meeting next Sunday afternoon. Just a loose group of women, mostly teachers, who were thinking about ways to help children who seemed to be falling through the cracks.
“You know,” she said, “tutoring or seeing to it that they eat lunch every day.”
October thought of little Walter Jean Campbell. After the episode with the girl’s mother, October had kept her distance. She considered all the other Walter Jean Campbells who needed help, and said she’d come.
The meeting at Donetta’s—mostly familiar names and faces, mostly chitchat about piddly salaries and hardheaded children—struck the familiar Du Bois chord. October needed to do more, get out more. This could be one way, a beginning. On the tail end of the meeting, when just about everybody was gone, Kenneth came home.
“I hear you’re looking for a place,” he said to her. “You ought to think about coming over here—there’s a sign in every other yard.”
He volunteered to drive around with her to see a few choice places whenever she wanted, and in fact, since she was over on this side of town, why didn’t they all go right then? And that was fine.
Bungalow—that was the style she wanted and, even better, what she could probably afford. Donetta and Kenneth believed in pushing the point and took her where Tim Crawford had never been willing to go.
As they rode around, Kenneth told her he’d been meaning to get in touch with her anyway. Charlie Parker’s mother still lived on Olive Street, and when Bird died, the college had started the Parker Fund. With money that musicians everywhere had donated in Bird’s name, the college had created the Charlie Parker Visiting Professorship—a new position. Kenneth’s job was to help find candidates, and they had to be from the Kansas City area. He mentioned venerable names like Coleman Hawkins and Lester Young. The college should be so lucky. Meanwhile, did she know how to get in touch with Leon Haskins?
“No,” October told him. Why did he think she kept up with Leon? One night, and people make up stories. But something told her to be nice to Kenneth. She could ask Cora. “But I can probably get his address from his brother,” she said.
“Good,” Kenneth said. “We haven’t been able to find him; thought he might be in Europe somewhere.”
On Walrond Street four or five blocks over from Cora and about a mile from Donetta, she found a place she liked—a remodeled bungalow with a screened-in porch and modem kitchen, unfinished basement and small but fenced-in backyard.
“Told you,” Kenneth said. “We’ve been all over these streets. You’ll like living over here.”
Step two. Once you choose a house, you have to get the bank to give you a mortgage loan. The house in Chillicothe had gone to Vergie and Gene, and October had gotten the nest egg. Frances and Maude didn’t have much, but they left it for her. She had spent some of it for her car, and now she would wipe out the rest if they would just let her have a mortgage.
Easy. The man at the bank asked her for her life history, beginning with her first job washing dishes when she was sixteen. He asked her to name people who would vouch for her, and they needed to be people who had something, owned something. When and what she got paid and how she spent every penny. And then he told her not to bother calling. She’d get a letter saying yea or nay.
“You should have warned me,” she told Cora on the phone. “I had to go back three times just to fill out all the information right.”
“I had Ed,” Cora said. “All I had to do was find the place. He took care of the rest. Don’t worry, you’ll get it. And when you do, remember I told you—it’s more than a handful. You have to keep up with a house.” She filled October in on her latest decorating woes, not to mention the new phase that had Eddy Junior saying no to her and biting.
Cora went on and October remembered to tell her about the Charlie Parker thing and ask her about Leon’s address.
“Lonny will never do that,” Cora said. “He’s too big for us now. If he can’t even send a Christmas card to his brother, he sure as hell won’t move back here.”
October thought aloud that it could be a break for somebody like Leon—“You know, time off.”
“A couple of years? Lonny wouldn’t do that. He’s been all over the world, girl. Every time you look up you see his name on some album. What would he want with a college job?”
“So you-all don’t have an address?” October asked.
Cora told her that the last one they had was supposed to be some chichi place downtown or uptown or east side or west side in New York City. Anyway, the mail came back and she sent it in care of the musicians’ union there. It was Lonny’s birthday card. It never came back. She still had the address for the union.
Little Alonzo Phillips—a Walter Jean of sorts, only he was a boy, and not at all meek and mild—made it easy for October to imagine another whole career. She loved nothing better than to see a pair of little eyes light up with the right answer, when children finally learned how to put one idea together with another. Some days she thought that if she ever gave up teaching, it would be because of the mud she had to swim through to get them to sit still long enough for the ideas to osmose into their little brains.
Geography was not one of their best subjects, and the last hour of the day was not the best time to teach it, but if the lesson plans said do it, she did it. On the blackboard at the front of the room, she had drawn a sketchy map of the United States in colored chalk, with the Great Lakes and major rivers in blue. The children
would be coming up to label all the bodies of water, including the oceans and the Gulf. And then they would label the major mountain chains and so forth.
Just as she drew the pointer lines for labeling, a chewed wad of bubble gum sailed past her, hitting the blackboard, but not hard enough to stick. And in one of those tricks of balance, she spun around, it fell, and she stepped right on it. Ropy mess between the sole of her high heels and the floor.
The class snickered.
She asked, “Who threw the gum?” knowing already.
“Alonzo!” the class was all too happy to say. Showdown. Alonzo and the teacher would entertain them away from the Erie Canal, wherever that was.
Before she knew it, October had slipped her feet out of her shoes and marched down the row to his desk. She saw herself grabbing him by the scruff of his shirt before she actually did anything, and thought better of it.
“No recess tomorrow,” she told him. He grinned, like staying in was a lollipop.
“Go! Go sit in the coatroom!” she told him. “And don’t let me hear a peep out of you.”
Where would they be without coatrooms? The coatroom saved her from having to march him down to the office, or having to put up with him distracting other children from the side aisle. At the back of the class, the coatroom had a door, and she had half a mind to shut it, leave him in there where he couldn’t see or hear anything. But she left it open and went on with the lesson.
After school, when all the children had collected their lunch pails from the coatroom and put on their coats and were gone, and after she had made notes on tomorrow’s lesson plans and washed down the blackboards, Donetta came over. October got her puree from her desk and took her coat from the supply closet at the front of the room, and they walked together to their cars.
She had been home for about an hour when the telephone rang. The janitor had found Alonzo Phillips asleep with his coat on in the coatroom. Her principal was calling to find out what she had to say.
