All Aunt Hagar's Children

COMMON LAW

Seven-year-old Amy Witherspoon, only child of Idabelle and Matthew Witherspoon, knew pretty Miss Georgia real well, pretty Miss Georgia with all her precious clothes and her precious shoes, but the girl didn’t know very much about the man who knocked Miss Georgia down the stairs in July 1955. Amy had never paid much attention to the man before that Saturday afternoon she looked up from the stoop leading to the stairs to Georgia’s place, up from being on her foursies while playing jacks with Ethel Brown, and saw the man at the top of Miss Georgia’s stairs, his fists balled up and his face full of meanness.

As it happened, the man who knocked Miss Georgia down the stairs had been introduced to the pretty woman just two weeks before by Amy’s own daddy at the What Ailing Ya beer garden at the southwest corner of 5th and M Streets, N.W. Georgia Evans was her parents’ third child, and before she left home, she had never seen any sky but the sky over Scottsboro, Alabama. Georgia had been married three times, but her mama and daddy had never seen the third man in the flesh because he was killed not long after the honeymoon in 1953 by a blind man who claimed he was shooting at someone else. The parents had a picture of the third husband with his arm around Georgia, taken the day before he died; it was stuck in their mirror frame just above the one of their youngest child in his high school graduation cap and gown.

Georgia had always considered the corners of 5th and M as her lucky corners. One night in a rainstorm, she had found a diamond ring on the ground in front of the liquor store on the northeast corner, and on the southwest corner she had met her second husband as she came out of the Goldbergs’ basement grocery store. “Ma’am, do you know which way is Ridge Street?” the man who would be her second husband asked, arrayed in a blue sharkskin suit. “I sure do. I live on Ridge Street. Just come this way.” He was a good husband, brought his paycheck home to her for many years, but he was forever homesick for Mississippi, and that was what did in their love, or so the children—who got it secondhand by listening in on grown folks’ conversations—on Ridge Street said.

“Georgia, this here my friend Kenyon,” Amy Witherspoon’s father Matthew said the night he introduced her to the man who would knock her down the stairs and dare her to get up and come up for some more. It was a Thursday and the What Ailing Ya wasn’t very crowded. Georgia was one of three women in the beer garden, the only unattached one, and for more than a half an hour she had been drinking beer in a corner booth a few feet from the jukebox, thinking about what numbers she would play tomorrow. Her pet number, 459, had come out 549 that day, and she was upset because she hadn’t played it in a combination and had lost $200. She had planned to go straight home from being a maid all day at the hotel at 14th and Pennsylvania Avenue, but something told her to take in a beer in the same spot where she had first met her last boyfriend, and then, two months later in the same booth, told him to kiss her ass before kissing the Devil’s ass. She wasn’t necessarily looking for a boyfriend that night she met Kenyon.

“Hi you do, Georgia? Thas a pretty name,” Kenyon said. Then he told his first lie: “Georgia my favorite state.” He actually hated the state of Georgia because it had executed his uncle, an armless man who was as innocent as Jesus Christ. Kenyon was kind of tall, depending upon how much leaning he did, and he was as light-skinned as Sweet Daddy Grace, whose church at 6th and M Georgia sometimes attended. She went to that church only because she admired Sweet Daddy’s long fingernails. Kenyon was a chauffeur and he had on his dark gray chauffeur suit. “And another damn thing,” Georgia would say after he had slapped her three times that Saturday afternoon and before he knocked her down the stairs, “why don’t you get another suit? I’m sick and tired of seein you traipsin round here in that one.”

“Thank you, Kenyon,” Georgia said after he told her she had a pretty name. She took a big swig of her beer because she knew another would soon be on the way. “Thank you very much. It was my mama’s mama’s name. Kenyon is a nice name, too. And thas a nice suit you wearin there.”

“Just my everyday-go-to-work clothes.”

“Oh? What kinda work you do, Kenyon?”

“Well,” Matthew said. “I see you in good hands, Georgia, so I’m gonna leave you two to get acquainted.”

“Good hands?” Georgia said. She was at the top of her second beer, and that was always the point where everything in the world started looking like Christmas morning after the second of ten gifts had been opened. “A girl sometimes needs more than good hands. She needs them capable hands.”

Kenyon laughed, and then Matthew trailed behind him seconds later with his own laughter. Matthew, father to the child Amy, had been three days sober, was trying to stay sober for his little girl. And when he was sober he processed everything a mite slower, or so all his friends said. Actually, it was simply that the world wasn’t very funny when he wasn’t drinking. Matthew was in that beer garden because he figured that if Jesus could resist temptation in the desert with the Devil dogging him, then he, lowly Matthew, could face temptation in a bar. But the Devil had gotten smarter in two thousand years, and now he had less to work with.

“I got the best hands. Capable hands,” Kenyon said, and Matthew slapped him on the back and went back to his Pepsi-Cola at the bar. Matthew didn’t drink anything stronger that night, but the Devil sat down next to him the next night. It took the gray-suited Devil only eight minutes, and it wasn’t long before Amy’s father was raising his glass of rum and soda and singing to an applauding bar:

Pepsi-Cola hits the spot

12 ounces that’s a lot

Twice as much for a nickel, too,

Pepsi-Cola is the drink for you.

“Mind if I have a seat?” Kenyon said, already on the way to sitting down before she could answer.

“It’s a free country,” Georgia said.

“Everywhere but in your space. Can I buy you a beer?”

“Sure,” Georgia said. “But why don’t you wait till I’m finished this one.”

He looked at how much was still in her glass and said, “Then you don’t plan on kickin me away from your table any time soon.”

“I don’t know. It depends on how much you get on my nerves. I might kick you out, but your beer gonna stay.” He laughed and she laughed. The last woman Kenyon Morrison was boyfriend to was even now in the house of her childhood on East Capitol Street, N.E., recovering from a broken jaw and a dislocated eye socket. The pain medicine the D.C. General people had prescribed gave her nightmares, and she would wake and scream that she had to hide from Jesus. After she had been beaten up the last time and her jaw made to wobble from side to side like a rickety streetcar and her eye threatening to become mush, she and her children had to move in with her parents because she could not care for them anymore. “I love you, Kenyon,” she said to the ambulance attendant through a delirium of pain on the way to D.C. General. “I love you.” The woman and her nightmares had set the house of her childhood on edge, and her little girl and her little boy were failing life and her parents, who had never raised their hands to each other, thought that this would be their lot for the rest of their days—caring for a once-upona-time good and strong woman who had had so much promise but now was going insane in the light blue room she had been happy in as a girl.

“Oh, so thas how it gonna be, huh?” Kenyon said. “Love my beer but don’t love me.”

“I didn’t say that,” Georgia said and took a large sip of the beer that would be the last she would buy for herself that night. “I didn’t say that atall. Don’t you be puttin words in my mouth.”

“I’m sorry. I wouldn’t do that. It’s just that the idea of you kickin me away made me kinda sad, thas all.”

“Awww, sweetums. I apologize. Okay? Does that feel better? I’m sorry.”

“I don’t know if I’m ready to cept your pology yet. We’ll see. We’ll just have to see.” He was a very handsome man and had teeth so beautiful that women often thought at first that they were false. But he would click them for a woman, and she knew right off that they were real. Georgia prided herself on not being one to go for looks in a man, but that was not true, and any of her friends—from Martha Smith to Frieda Carson to Cornelia Walsh—would have said so.

Kenyon moved into Georgia’s place at 459 Ridge Street, N.W., eighteen days after they met. “I know it’s sudden,” Georgia told Cornelia Walsh. It was the Sunday before he moved in, and Cornelia and her daughter Lydia had come to visit. Lydia was in the big easy chair next to the window, playing with her Chatty Cathy doll, listening and not listening to the grown folks. “My name is Lydia and I live in Washington,” the girl sang, bouncing the doll on her knees. “Lydia is my name and Washington is my city.”

“Well, just be careful,” said Cornelia, a religious woman whose one dream was to see the Holy Land before she died. Her daughter had promised her that she would become a doctor and make enough money to take her there.

About then Kenyon knocked at the door and Georgia got up from the couch to let him in. Tomorrow, before twilight, he would have his own key. He came in and Georgia introduced him to Cornelia and her daughter Lydia and he shook Cornelia’s hand and told her he had heard what a good and fine woman she was and then he pinched Lydia’s cheek and told her she would be as pretty as her mother one day. Sooner, he added, if she drank her milk every day. “Whas that dolly’s name?” he asked, still leaning toward the girl and her doll. He stood up straight before she could answer and told Georgia he didn’t want to be late for that double feature at the Gem, that she’d better get herself ready and tell her company she’d see them another day. Georgia started to say something, but she didn’t think it was worth the effort, and besides, he had dressed up nice to take her to the moving picture show.

Downstairs out on the street, the child Amy Witherspoon said Hi to Georgia and Cornelia and Lydia, and then everyone had to say Hi back to her and her two little friends, Carlos Newman and Ethel Brown. Georgia asked Ethel how her mother was because her mother had been doing poorly since she had her second child, and Ethel said she was doing better and that the baby was going to be christened Saturday, no maybe not Saturday but Sunday if her grandmother got down in time from Philadelphia, which was in Pennsylvania, Miss Georgia, you know. And Georgia said she was glad to hear that. Kenyon stood to the side of everyone, the sweetness was gone from his Juicy Fruit gum, and he wanted another stick real bad. Then the two women listened as the two girls talked about their dolls and Amy said she had left her doll at home to rest up from the big Princess ball that was held last night, and the two women looked at each other in a ain’t-that-cute way and the boy Carlos popped three big bubbles with his Bazooka bubble gum, which still had plenty of sweetness left. The third pop made Kenyon grab Georgia’s shoulder and tell her loudly that he didn’t want to miss that gotdamn double feature at that gotdamn Gem Theater. And Ethel went Oohh oohh you said a bad word and Kenyon walked away toward 5th Street.

“I best get on,” Georgia said to everyone, but especially to Cornelia, her friend of fifteen years.

“I talk to you later,” Cornelia said and Georgia went off after Kenyon, who was only a few feet from 5th. The Gem was playing something with Robert Taylor and he liked Taylor, liked him even more than he liked John Garfield.

“I tell my mama you asked bout her,” Ethel shouted to Georgia. “We still waitin on my grandma from Philadelphia, down in Pennsylvania….” Ethel’s mother had been a Crenshaw before marriage, and everyone in the neighborhood said that if you married a Crenshaw you had a good partner for life, that they were true and blue and everything one might want in a good wife or a good husband. You could take that to the bank and they wouldn’t blink when they gave you a million dollars on it.

The four of them, the woman and the boy and the two girls, watched Georgia catch up with Kenyon and shift her pocketbook to her right hand and slip her left arm through his. He was walking a bit away from the curb, not giving her enough room to walk between him and the houses on the right, and so she had to bump bump bump him with her hip toward the curb because etiquette required that a woman walk on the inside and a man walk on the outside to protect her from whatever might come from the street and the gutter. Kenyon resisted because even as they walked, he could see Robert Taylor already up on the Gem’s screen saying and doing things that made his heart flutter and his brain go Yeah, yeah, thas the way to do it, Bobby. You tell em.

Judy Hathaway came up from the other side of Ridge Street and said Good afternoon to Cornelia, mentioned what a nice Sunday it was. Judy was sixty-seven years old, and if anyone in the neighborhood had to play a number, they went to her. She was the mother to four children, but they had all perished in their thirties, a child each year for four years in a row—breast cancer, heart attack, a questionable accident while in the navy, a self-inflicted wound to the temple. Judy knew what it was like to lose a child, Amy’s mother once said. “I couldn’t find a better godmother to look after my child.”

“Where you headed?” Cornelia asked Judy.

“Just round to the sto. Got a taste for some stew meat tonight.”

“That sounds just right,” Cornelia said. “I know where I’m eatin tonight.” Most colored people on Ridge Street ate chicken on Sunday, but Judy wasn’t most colored people.

“Can I come, too, Grandma?” the girl Ethel said. They were not blood kin, but nearly every child on Ridge Street who could speak called Judy Grandma. Carlos Newman was one of the few who didn’t. The boy had two grandmothers already, and he knew and loved them very well. But more than that, he was very new to Ridge Street and was just feeling his way. He, like Amy and Ethel, was seven years old.

Judy laughed at Ethel and swept the girl to her. “Sho. I make anough for everybody,” and she kissed the child not once, but three times about the cheek. At twenty-four Judy had killed her first husband way deep in the woods where they had lived and then she had run away from Arkansas, telling everyone she ever met that she was a child of Louisiana. The only witnesses to her murdering her husband were the animals they had around the place—the chickens the husband always threw his shoe at. The brown dog that whimpered to see his master dead in the kitchen; the same dog that always brought the shoe back. The white dog that followed Judy as she dragged the dead man out the back door and around the well and to the garden. She had fewer muscles than she would have when she arrived in Washington seventeen years later, so hauling her dead man around the garden would have taken her another half a day. Instead, to save time, she pulled her dead man through the garden, a ragged trail through that bed of perfect and ripe food, then out along the beaten path to the place behind the privy. The brown dog stayed home. The white dog did not follow through the garden because his master had trained him with sticks and stones not to go near the garden, so he took the long way to the grave. They had no neighbors to speak of. When it was time to leave—after the grave had settled so that anyone seeing it might think a body was the very last thing buried there—the white dog followed her quite eagerly, but the brown one would not go, despite all her pleading. “There ain’t nothin for you here anymore. Come with us.” But the brown creature knew what the white dog was to learn beyond Arkansas—that leaving that place could break your heart, even while traveling with a loved one.

“Well,” Cornelia said to Judy, “me and Lydia might as well come along to the sto since we goin that way anyway.”

“Can I come, too, Grandma?” Amy said, and Judy said the same thing to her that she had said to Ethel.

“Yall go tell somebody where you at then.” The two girls ran to their homes to tell somebody.

Carlos looked at Amy running away, then looked up at Judy, who said to him, “You can come, too, if you mama say so.” She did not know him very well, but that would change.

Carlos nodded and set off for home, across Ridge Street. He didn’t care about the store and Miss Judy and playing about on a bright Sunday, but he was in love with Amy Witherspoon and he could barely stand to be out of her presence. Amy knew he cared about her but always told people she was going to marry her daddy when she grew up. I just can’t marry you, she would tell Carlos, less my daddy died and I was a poor widow woman. Daddy being Matthew Witherspoon, who had returned to drink after the Devil sat down next to him at What Ailing Ya. Carlos knew marriage to her father would never happen, and he believed that if he held on long enough she would be his to marry. In three months he would be eight years old. His heart would not beat for very long on Ridge Street, but as long as it did, it would beat for Amy.

“I wish I could find me some nice greens,” Cornelia said. “I done had a taste for greens for the longest.”

“You and me both,” Judy said.

“I mean what I said bout comin over to supper,” Judy said. “Vinnie eat like a bird and I end up havin all them leftovers. Leftovers leftovers. Sometimes I think I’m gonna die of leftovers.”

Lydia, holding her doll up in front of her, skipped down past three houses over the brick sidewalk, turned and hopscotched back over an invisible board. She chanted:

Yo mama and my mama was out back, hangin up clothes

My mama socked yo mama in her big old fat nose.

Two weeks later, on a Saturday morning in early July, Carlos woke in his bed at 450 Ridge and raised his hand and traced the cracks in the ceiling with his index finger. It was going to be a long morning because Amy had told him she was sleeping over at her father’s mother’s house and wouldn’t be back until about noon. He had made three good male friends on Ridge, but they sometimes said nasty things about girls, about pussy and stuff, and he was worried that any day now they would say something bad about Amy and then he’d have to fight them, use his fists just the way his father had taught him. But maybe not; after all, the three had sisters and they would have to put their own sisters in that nasty bag they put all the other girls in.

He cocked his finger and shot at the crack that was a robber man. “Badge 714 got you again,” he said. He rolled over and thought of watching television. They had one, but his father didn’t think much of it and had gotten one just to placate his wife and Carlos and Carlos’s older brother. His father had bought the television set on time, though he could have afforded to pay for it outright.

Carlos sat on the side of the bed and picked at the scab on his knee, the result of a fall the day before. He pulled out his quarter from under his mattress and flipped it once, dropping it and watching it roll across the floor and fall next to one of his brother’s socks. The television had a little metal box on the side, and whenever the Newman family wanted to watch it, they would insert a quarter in the box and the television would give them an hour’s worth of viewing. Sometimes the box gave them a few minutes more of viewing, sometimes a few minutes less. Every Saturday afternoon a white man in a noisy little truck came and opened the box and gave the Newmans a receipt for whatever was in the box, as well as a receipt for any extra money they wanted to pay down on the television. “At this rate,” Carol Newman once told her husband, “we’ll be paying on this thing when we’re too old to even see it.” “Thas the whole idea,” Brandon said and kissed his wife full on the lips. “But you’ll still have this.” “I might be too old to enjoy that, too,” Carol said. “Oh no, my lovin never goes outa style.” The worst thing for Carlos was to be watching wrestling on a Saturday night and have the set go dark just when the program got good and there weren’t any quarters to be found in the whole house. Even Brandon Newman hated that.

Carlos got down to crawl to retrieve the quarter. For that moment he forgot the sore and the pain of hitting the floor jolted him. “Damn!” he said. He stopped and waited and listened. His door was closed, but his mother had a thousand ears and most of them were in the walls. For her, cursing was one of the biggest sins because, as she told her sons time and time again, it led to greater sins, like robbery and the end of the family and rape and the suffering of children in Africa and even murder. “Damn” in itself was not a very big word, only four letters, and yet it could lead to the end of the world. Carlos’s brother believed her, but Carlos was a little slow in accepting.

He crawled the rest of the way to the quarter. He picked it up and read the words on it. Was an hour of television worth it right now? He stood and remembered all that he could buy with a quarter for Amy. Twenty-five Mary Janes. Twenty-five Squirrel Nuts. They could feast for days, while television was here and then gone. And who knew what was on right then? He put the quarter in his mouth and said, “Mother, may I?” and made two giant steps over to his side of the room. On the other side, he decided to save his money.

“Put your clothes on, boy. I want you ready to eat when your father gets back from the store.” His mother was standing in the door. Her face said she hadn’t heard the bad word. “Yes, ma’am. Mama, what time is it?” “Near about nine o’clock.” She closed the door. Three hours until Amy. God was such a mean man. Why couldn’t he put noon closer to nine? Nine, twelve, ten, eleven, one….

He got outside about ten-thirty and saw Georgia’s Kenyon moving slowly across the street. Kenyon stood outside 459 Ridge and called up to Georgia, who stuck her head out the window. Carlos couldn’t hear what they were saying, but Georgia kept shaking her head to everything Kenyon said. Carlos lived next door to Judy Hathaway and her third husband, Vinnie, who had two cars. He was working on one of them, a Dodge he called Portia Did-Me-Wrong, and after a while he raised his head from under the hood to look at Kenyon. Finally, Kenyon said loud enough for Carlos and Vinnie to hear, “I don’t give a sweet gotdamn bout that, Georgia!” Across and down the street, Ethel and Billie Montcrief heard him, too; nine-year-old Billie still had the cast on his arm from falling out of the tree a week before. “Just throw it down here, Georgia! Do I gotta do everything myself? Can’t you listen to a damn thing I say. Lord have mercy!” Vinnie and Carlos looked at each other, and the man smiled and wiped his hands with a dirty cloth he pulled from his pocket and the boy shrugged. Kenyon had a suit on, but it wasn’t his chauffeur suit.

Billie saw Carlos and shouted for him to come cross the street to play with him and Ethel and Tommy Carson, who was trying to skate toward them but was doing more falling than he was skating. Georgia threw something in a paper bag out of the window and after Kenyon inspected it, he said, “This ain’t the shit I want, Georgia. You fuckin dumb bitch.” Vinnie kept on looking at Carlos. The night of the day Vinnie married Judy, she told him what she had done in Arkansas. She began to cry and he pulled her to him; it would be another two days before they would consummate their marriage. One-arm Billie shouted to Carlos, “My mama won’t let me cross the street no more since my accident.” Everyone knew that by now but Billie felt he had to repeat it as much as possible so no one would think he was being a sissy on his own. “I got this cast on and stuff…” In two giant steps, Kenyon was up the stoop and then through the door to the stairs leading up to Georgia’s apartment. Carlos couldn’t hear him bounding up the steps to the apartment, but Tommy could because he, sitting on the ground and tightening his skates, was the closest to Georgia’s place. “Come on over, Carlos,” Billie said. Standing between Vinnie’s car and his father’s car, Carlos looked right and left and then dashed across.

Amy came back early, about eleven, and Carlos was happier. A small group of children gravitated down the street to the shared stoop onto which Georgia and Tommy Carson’s doors opened. Tommy and his family lived in the downstairs apartment. The skates were hand-me-downs from his brother, which was why he was having so much trouble with them. His mother had promised him a brand-new pair for Christmas, but this was July and if there was anything Tommy Carson could do right, it was count.

Kenyon had left the door open when he had gone upstairs, as well as the door to the apartment itself, but none of the children noticed as they sat and played around the stoop about one-thirty. One-arm Billie and Carlos were making copies of the funny papers from some Silly Putty Carlos had brought over, and Tommy was on the ground putting WD-40 into the wheels of the skates. He had surmised that that was the real problem with them—ball bearings thirsty for oil. “Now do that one,” Billie said to Carlos, pointing to a fat man on the funny page with a green suit. Billie liked the way everything came out on the putty the reverse of whatever the funny page showed. “Then do his wife after that.” “How you know thas his wife?” Carlos asked. “I can just tell thas his wife.”

On the stoop with the boys were Amy and Ethel, playing jacks. Amy always had trouble after passing her foursies. She had just kissed the ball for good luck and started in on her threesies when everyone save Tommy, who was spinning the skate wheels to see if they sounded any different, heard the thump and then the thumpety-thump coming from up at Miss Georgia’s place. Amy made her threesies and kissed the ball again and threw the jacks. She had just picked up her first four when there was another thump and Georgia came tumbling down the steps. Her body twisted about midway the descent as she tried to grip the banister, but Kenyon had hit her too hard for her to get a good grip, and after her body twisted she began to fall, about halfway, with her head first. She had on a housecoat, and the girls and the boys could see her shame with her red underwear as the housecoat came loose in the fall. She bumped her way down to the entrance, screaming and crying on every step. At the bottom, she lay silent for a minute or so, her eyes closed, and each boy and each girl thought she was dead. “Miss Georgia?” Amy said. Georgia was a good woman, Amy’s mother had once said, but she wouldn’t make the kind of godmother that Miss Judy would.

Georgia opened her eyes and looked at Amy from upside down. And then, like some kind of afterthought, a small jewel of blood appeared at the corner of her mouth. “Miss Georgia?” Georgia used what strength she had left to lift her arm from her chest, which was heaving, and raise her hand to the little girl. “Just leave her be,” Kenyon said from the top of the stairs. He had on the same suit from that morning and his fists were on his hips. A lion tamer in a movie had stood like that, Carlos thought. Amy, sitting, scooted closer to Georgia, her hand out to the woman. “Miss Georgia?” “I said to leave her be!” Kenyon took his fists from his hips to emphasize what he was saying. “Miss Georgia, I’m here…” Kenyon was down the steps, straddling Georgia. He raised his foot to tap Amy’s hand away. Georgia’s hand was still reaching out to Amy. “Hey!” Carlos said, looking at Kenyon’s foot. “Hey!” Kenyon pulled his foot back even though Amy had kept her hand out to Georgia. “You little shit,” Kenyon said to Carlos. “Learn to respect your damn elders.” “Ooh, ooh,” Ethel said. “He said a bad word.” Kenyon closed the door with his foot.

Amy fainted as soon as the lock on the door clicked in place. She would have hit her head on the concrete, but she fell toward Carlos and her head hit his chest, and, once again, the boy thought he was looking at a dead person. “Amy,” he said, “please don’t be dead.” Tommy ran up the steps of the stoop and said he was going to get his father. One-arm Billie said he was going to get Amy’s mother and he took off. Ethel stood watching Carlos hold Amy. He was a boy all skin and bones, but that wasn’t why she hadn’t liked him very much until that very moment. “She ain’t dead, Carlos,” Ethel said, “I can see her breathin and stuff.” “You sure, Ethel. You sure…?” The boy was crying. “I’m sure, Carlos. I can see her breathin right on like all the time before.”

Tommy’s father Moses came out and collected Amy in his arms. “What yall doin out here for her to get hurt?” “Nothin, Daddy,” Tommy said, one skate in each hand. “It was Mr. Kenyon and Miss Georgia fightin.” Moses Carson took Amy down the street to her house and the children trailed after him. “We didn’t do nothin, Daddy,” Tommy kept saying. Moses was not a father to be shy with the switch or the belt and Tommy needed to get his innocence on the record real quick. “We was just playin, havin fun. Thas all.” Amy woke halfway there, and halfway to her house her mother and one-arm Billie met Moses. “I think she just fainted or somethin, Idabelle,” Moses said. “She gon be all right.” “It was them, Daddy,” Tommy said. “We didn’t do nothin.” Moses said, “Les just get her in the house.” Idabelle went to her house and opened the door and Moses stepped through the door and put Amy down gently on the couch. “You gon be fine,” Moses said. “Daddy, we was just playin and—” “I heard you, Tommy. For goodness sakes!”

The children crowded around the couch. “Yall back off,” Moses said, “and give her a little room.” They stepped back, Carlos drying his tears on the bottom of his polo shirt and Ethel saying it was the bad man that hurt Amy and Idabelle putting a wet cloth to her child’s forehead while asking Ethel what bad man, what bad man would hurt a child? Still holding his skates, Tommy, emboldened by the knowledge that he was free and clear, told Idabelle that nobody really hit Amy but Kenyon did hit Georgia. The adults looked at each other. “Ain’t that right, Carlos?” Tommy asked. Amy moaned on the couch, her eyes closed.

The children in the living room were not among those in the neighbor hood known to be liars—the-wolf-is-comin-so-you-better-get-your-gun type of liars. Twelve-year-old Larry Comstock down the street at 412 Ridge was that kind of liar; people said they couldn’t be that big a liar if their middle names were Liar. He lied like a grown man, people said. He said he saw his grandmother’s best friend burn his grandmother’s hair in a brown-and-white cereal bowl and turn around three times while the hair burned green and then purple and while the friend shouted Jesus get way back and Devil come forward. By the time people realized he was lying about that and most everything else, the two women, who had come up together from South Carolina when neither had child nor chick, had fallen out with one another, and Larry was on his way to reform school for breaking into houses and drinking people’s liquor and falling asleep drunk in their beds with his dirty tennis shoes on.

So when Moses looked at Idabelle and they both looked at the moaning Amy, they were thinking of Larry, and they knew that Tommy and Ethel and Carlos were not in Larry’s league. But still, there was too much strange talk of a child and hitting and a man, and so they called the police. An hour later, the police came, the white one staying outside in the squad car reading the newspaper with a giant magnifying glass while the Negro went into Idabelle’s. The policeman listened to the children, then went down the street to talk with Kenyon while the white man drove the car down the few doors. After the Negro policeman finished, he came back, walked into the wrong house, then found Idabelle’s, and the white policeman reversed the car and came back to where he had been reading the newspaper with the magnifying glass.

Kenyon was innocent of hitting the child, the Negro policeman concluded and left the home and got into the passenger seat and they drove away.

Amy did not go back out to play that day. Despite the truth as determined by Idabelle and Moses and the police, the word went around that day among the children of Ridge Street who had not been witnesses that Kenyon had beaten up not only Georgia but Carlos and Tommy. He had half killed Amy, which was why she wasn’t outside. He had broken Billie’s other arm, which explained his absence, though in fact the boy had only gone to the movies with his father and two sisters and his aunt Lavenia Middleton, who was getting married in September for the first time at forty-nine. She was marrying a Jasper, one of the Northeast Jaspers. People said she was lucky not to get mixed up with one of the Southwest Jaspers.

Amy slept the rest of the day and all night, and in the morning she had her first dream that Georgia was coming to get her, and not her daddy or mama or Grandma Judy with her walking stick or anyone else could protect her. Her mother had to shake the screaming girl awake at about ten on Sunday morning. “Is she here?” Amy kept saying after she woke. “Is Miss Georgia here to get me?” “Nobody’s here but me and Abe,” Idabelle said. Abe Thatcher was the man who loved and wanted to marry Idabelle if she could straighten out where in her life Amy’s father fit. Day by day she was coming to the conclusion that there was no future with her estranged husband Matthew.

Idabelle took Amy in her arms. The fan in the window blew on them and Idabelle wiped the sweat from her daughter’s face and Abe Thatcher stood in the doorway with his hands in his pockets. Amy was the first child he had ever been close to as a man, and he didn’t know what to do. His parents, a Negro and a Jewish woman, had headed a socialist organization in New York City. He had wanted Amy to call him Abe but Idabelle, like most everyone else in D.C. who wasn’t raised a New York socialist, didn’t believe in children calling grown-ups by their first names. Amy usually called him Mr. Abe, though only yesterday she had taken the first step to him and called him “my Able Abe with the missin tooth.” The fan was blowing too loud, and Abe wondered if it was the motor or the blades hitting the protective grill. “Miss Georgia’s comin to get me, Mama,” Amy said after she had calmed. “Georgia likes you, honey pie. She wouldn’t hurt you for anything in the world.” “She did in the dream, Mama. She really did. She had her hand out and she said, ‘Ima get you, Amy. Ima really get you this time.’” “Well, we gon give you a bath and some of Abe’s famous flapjacks and you gon feel right as rain. No more bad dreams after that.” “What about my tattoo?” Amy said. She had a temporary tattoo of a butterfly that Carlos had applied on Saturday; Carlos had bought ten tattoos on a piece of paper for a nickel and Amy had licked a spot on her wrist and he tore off the corner with the butterfly and applied it to the spot. “We’ll wash all around it. You just hold your arm up from the water and it’ll stay on forever.”

The dream came back that afternoon and the girl sat on the couch wrapped in a blanket for the rest of the day. She begged to sleep with her mother, and she managed to get a little sleep that Sunday night with her mother’s arms around her.

Generally, she stayed with Judy during the summer days while her mother worked. That Monday she begged her mother to stay home, but Idabelle said she had to work for them to live right. Amy didn’t cry and let her mother go off without a word. During her lunch break as a keypunch operator at the Federal Housing Administration, Idabelle called around and found Matthew and told him his daughter needed him. “I just saw her on Saturday morning,” Matthew said, “and she was doin fine.” He was confused and was thinking of a Saturday two weeks before. “You fool,” Idabelle said, “that was then. This is Monday and she needs you to go by to see how she’s doin.” “Why don’t you get your Abe to see how she’s doin?” He knew he didn’t love her anymore, but the Devil in the gray suit made him say some awful things.

They were both quiet, for he knew Abe was a good man. Matthew was many things, but he was not a blind fool. “I like him,” Amy had said to her father and his mother. The fault had long been Matthew’s, the drinking, this woman, that woman. Idabelle had been long-suffering; a blues woman could sing a whole album about her, and she and Matthew both knew that. So after the silence, he said he would go by to see Amy. She hung up and stared at the telephone dial. For many years she had remembered his telephone number from when they first met, afraid that to forget meant he would disappear from her life. It was DECatur 7-4 something or other; nowadays, she had to consult her address book for the numbers after the four. Abe had said he was ready to buy her a ring when she was ready. He sometimes used big words when little ones would suffice, but she liked the way she could put the very tip of her tongue through that space in his teeth and make him tingle.

Amy Witherspoon did not fare well for much of the rest of the summer. When not plagued with the dreams about Georgia, the child suffered a lethargy that caused her to sleep most of the time on her mother’s couch during the evenings and weekends or on Judy’s couch during the days while her mother worked. Amy, “poor Idabelle’s miracle after goin through so many miscarriages,” was well liked in the neighborhood, and everyone prayed that she would get better, but in their beds at night, after the lights had been turned out, adults feared that the girl was not long for this world. The doctors, none of whom were native Washingtonians, knew nothing, blaming everything on the D.C. heat. “Keep her cool,” they said. Children continued to play on Ridge Street that summer, but they tried to be quiet when near Idabelle’s or Judy’s. “Shhh, stop bein so loud,” they told each other. That was also the way they were when near a house where there had been a recent death. “Shhh, Miss Rita just died in there. Les go someplace else.”

Carlos and Ethel came each day to see her and Amy would rouse herself to play on the living room floor at her mother’s or Judy’s. Carlos, to be sure, was particularly affected by not having her play with him outside. He bought her Sno-Ball cupcakes and Nehi sodas and Kits by the handful, but the girl of early summer was not there. While she slept, he came to enjoy talking to Miss Judy, usually over sodas in her kitchen. She had pictures of a colored Jesus in every room in her house and Carlos asked her, during their first full conversation, if she had had some little boy put a brown face on Jesus with a crayon, for he had known only a white Jesus.

By mid-August, he felt comfortable enough with Judy to tell her that people said Amy was going to die and he had to beat one boy up for saying it. “I didn’t wanna hurt him, Miss Judy, but I had to.” It was a Friday. He, like Amy and several other children, usually stayed with Judy while their parents worked. “Thas two fights I been in this year,” Carlos said. He showed her the sore on his knuckle and she put Mercurochrome on it and told him he should watch himself because he might get into a fix he couldn’t get out of.

Then he told her that if Amy hadn’t seen Kenyon do what he did to Georgia, everything would have been all right. “She saw him beat Georgia?” Judy said. They were talking in early August.

“Saw him knock her down the steps,” Carlos said. “I did, too. We all did. He kinda went like this—POW!—and down she went. POW!”

“Oh, mercy!” Judy peered around the corner of the kitchen to make sure Amy was still sleeping on the couch. She knew the girl often dreamed of Georgia, but she hadn’t known that she had seen the violence, and as she listened to Carlos, she wondered why Amy didn’t dream of Kenyon.

“Miss Judy, she was bleedin, too.”

“Who?” People had rarely come to visit her and her first husband in those woods in Arkansas. Not being a very strong woman, she had had to dig the grave over three days after she had killed him. And, too, one of her shoulders had been dislocated two weeks before by her husband; the broken finger from two months or so before had already healed. It would have been easy to leave him lying with his head split open on the kitchen floor, but their house had always been a neat one, and she thought all Aunt Hagar’s children deserved a place in the ground. Dragging him out the back door, down the steps, through the garden bursting with beans and tomatoes and okra, along the path beside the new privy, past the old privy and then to a spot where the ground whispered that it would be amenable to receiving him—that dragging was almost as hard as the digging. “Who?” Judy said.

“Miss Georgia. She was bleedin right here.”

There was a knock at the door and Tommy came in wearing a baseball glove and holding a tennis ball in his other hand.

“Didn’t she, Tommy?” Carlos said.

“Didn’t she what?” Tommy said, putting his glove on the table after tucking the tennis ball in the glove.

“Didn’t Miss Georgia start bleedin after she got knocked down them stairs and everything?”

“Yes, ma’am,” Tommy said. “She sure did. They be fightin upstairs all the time.” He dashed around the table and started to playfully choke Carlos’s neck. “Like this,” and he gave Carlos a play-punch when he wasn’t choking him. Tommy said, “Ima kill you, you no-good somebody. Take this! BAM!” Carlos flailed his arms and pretended to be the battered Georgia in her apartment. He moaned, “Don’t you be killin me, Mr. Kenyon.” “She don’t say ‘Mr. Kenyon,’” Tommy said. “That ain’t what she say.” “Okay. Don’t you be killin me, Kenyon.” “Yeah,” Tommy said. “Thas it,” and he pounded a laughing Carlos on the top of the head, saying, “You ain’t no good! I don’t know why I waste my p-precious time with somethin like you!”

“All right, yall,” Judy said. “You gon wake Amy.” The boys continued on, silently fighting and reacting, silently mouthing words.

“My mama told my daddy to go up there and make him stop,” Tommy said.

“Oh, you storyin me,” Carlos said.

“Uh-huh,” Tommy said. “She really did. She said…she said like this, ‘Moses, why you don’t go up there and make that man stop hurtin her?’ And my daddy said, my daddy he said, ‘As long as he ain’t hittin you, why you worried, Lois?’ Thas my mama name,” Tommy informed Carlos, though Carlos knew that already. “And my mama said like this, ‘That ain’t the point, Moses.’ ‘Well, what is the point, Lois? For goodness sakes!’ And my mama said, ‘What happens if he kills her, Moses? What happens if he kills that poor woman just above your own children’s head? What happens then, huh, Moses?’ ‘She’ll be dead and you and the kids won’t be dead. Why you want me to get mixed up in another man’s business? Why you wanna put me in the middle of that mess?’ And my mama said, ‘I don’t know what I’m gonna do with you, Moses Carson.’ My daddy just got up from the table.”

“What he do then?” Carlos said. Judy was at the stove, tending to a pot of neck bones. Vinnie, even with his appetite like a bird’s, liked all parts of the pig, from the ears to the tail, and she cooked it all for him. Her doctor had told her to stay away from pork because it raised her blood pressure. Vinnie enjoyed neck bones with Great Northern beans, but three stores had been out of them, so now the bones were simmering with Navy beans. The corn bread could be cooked at the last moment.

“He went into the living room and turned on the radio.”

“Oh,” Carlos said. He liked a good story and hated that this one ended with a man in a living room listening to the radio. “Thas all?”

“Thas all I heard, cause then I went outside to play. You member? I came to see you and you was eatin your dinner. Carlos, you member when we saw her shame?”

“What?” Judy said.

The boys eyed each other. Tommy realized he had said too much, but he wanted to say more to hold Carlos’s attention.

“What you say?” Judy said.

“We saw her shame, Grandma,” Carlos said. He had followed the other children into calling her “Grandma.” He was rolling the tennis ball around the table and swinging his feet in the brand-new Keds just an inch above the rung of the chair and waiting for Judy to take the ball off the table because he didn’t know where it had been.

“Yep,” Tommy said. “She was showin her underwear.”

Judy tasted from the pot of neck bones. She had seen Georgia the other day, limping. “Just woke up with a touch of rheumatism,” Georgia said. How, Judy asked herself as they talked, had it all dissolved into plain open lies? How could it be that two women, one old enough to be mother to the other, could talk on such a nice summer day, and one lie with not a lot of blinking or looking away to hide the lie? And how could one accept the lie and carry it away like somebody’s everyday truth? “I had the same thing,” Judy told Georgia. “And what you do?” “I took a aspirin with a Stanback,” Georgia said. “You mix them two?” “Yeah, it don’t hurt me atall,” Georgia said. “I think them two would give me a stomachache,” Judy said.

“Grandma, can we go outside and play?” Carlos asked.

“All right,” she said. “But stay where I can see you. Yall got away yesterday, and I don’t like it.”

She put the top back on the pot of neck bones and wondered if there was enough crackling to go in the corn bread. Crackling could make a good pan of corn bread even better. The boys went out quietly, and she followed to make sure they closed the door all the way. Hers was one of the few houses on Ridge Street with air-conditioning. Amy was still asleep on the couch, a new tattoo of five many-colored balloons on her arm. Judy stood over the girl, remembering her christening, remembering the baby peeing as the priest held her, remembering the priest asking her and Vinnie and everyone else gathered who would stand for the child, asked if they would renounce Satan and all his ways. The Catholics had such strange rituals, she had thought again that day. At least the Baptists waited until a child was big enough to stand and have some idea of all that mumbo-jumbo. She looked up and could see the tennis ball pass by the window, going from one boy to the other. Vinnie did not know her as a woman who made a bad pan of corn bread, so maybe it would not matter if there was no crackling in the cupboard. “Throw it a little harder,” she heard Carlos say. She and Vinnie had said together, “We renounce Satan….” Her first husband had died back in Arkansas before he had even finished his breakfast, some biscuits, some eggs, some bacon, some coffee. Maybe that was one of the punishments of hell—an eternal yearning for the unfinished meal. “…and all his ways.”

She fed Amy and Vinnie an early supper. The girl was stronger, even playing with Ethel and Carlos before those two had to go home. Matthew came a little before six to take his daughter for the weekend to his mother’s place. The day had cooled and Judy followed them out and left the door open. Matthew slowed his gait to match his daughter’s and they went down the street and Kenyon came out of his door and called to Matthew, who then said something to Amy and set her little suitcase down beside her and went across Ridge to Kenyon. The two men were young enough to give each other boyish taps on the shoulders and then pretend to be boxing. Judy looked at Amy, who danced around the suitcase. The girl stopped and looked at her and waved, though they were less than twenty feet apart. Amy blew her a kiss and Judy blew her one back.

Judy saw Georgia on Sunday and told her straight out that she would be a better woman if she got rid of Kenyon. She was good looking, she had her own money, she could find another man, Judy said.

“I don’t think it’s any of your business what I do,” Georgia said. Judy had seen Cornelia, Georgia’s best friend, the day before and suggested that Cornelia put a word in Georgia’s ear about how she was wasting her life away with a man like that. Georgia was to go by Cornelia’s place that afternoon.

“You better than all this, Georgia, you really are.” The limp was gone and so were all the lumps on her face. She just looked a little tired, but that could have come from a long night of drinking. Maybe, Judy thought, things have gotten better and I done made a fool of myself.

“I don’t go to your house and tell you what to do,” Georgia said. “I don’t come to you and talk bad bout your husband.” Georgia walked away.

When Cornelia came at her later, Georgia first told her friend of more than fifteen years that things were not as bad as the whole neighborhood was going around saying. Then, as Cornelia kept at her, Georgia said Cornelia was just jealous because she didn’t have a man. She got up from Cornelia’s couch without any more words and rushed out the door, out past Cornelia’s daughter Lydia who was playing with friends. “Bye, Miss Georgia,” Lydia said. “Say bye, Cathy. Say bye to Miss Georgia.”

Amy’s mother, Idabelle, confronted Matthew about being friends with a man who had no more respect for their daughter than to beat up a woman in front of her. They were two weeks from the divorce, both knowing that an important time in their lives was ending and there wasn’t anything they could do about it anymore.

“Idabelle, I don’t think he woulda done a thing if he knew Amy was my child. He didn’t know.”

“He probably knew and didn’t give a damn,” she said. “The fact is, he did it in front of children period.” He had just returned Amy, who had gone upstairs to unpack her suitcase. Her parents were in the kitchen, far enough, they thought, from her bedroom. But the child came to the top of the stairs. She had never been one to entertain their getting back together. She liked them apart, and she didn’t mind Abe at all.

“You know, I don’t know what’s become of you,” Idabelle said.

“I could say the same bout you.” He took a beer from the icebox, needing something to do with his hands because he knew his were the greater sins. “Where the can opener?”

“Where it’s always been.” He fished in the silverware drawer and found it. Idabelle said, “You used to be everything. You used to be everything in the world.” He opened the can and dropped the opener back in the drawer and sat at the table, nearest the open back door.

“I’m not a bad man, Idabelle. I never hit you or anybody else like Kenyon.”

She was leaning against the sink with her arms folded. Abe had gone up to New York City to visit his parents. “No, Matthew, you ain’t a bad man, as men go. You was just never as good as you coulda been. And bein that good coulda been so easy for you, too.” He drank half the beer in one gulp and then looked at the words on the can. Was it this week or last week that he had promised to drink no more? Go, my son, and drink no more. He knew he had better pace himself because Idabelle would not allow him a second one from her icebox. He studied each letter of the words on the can. Was Carling some guy’s name? Was his whole name Carling Black Label?

“Leave me in peace, Idabelle.”

“I will,” she said. “I will. I can promise you that. I been thinkin bout all you promised me once. You even promised my daddy how you would take care of me forever. I can still see you, sittin at my daddy’s table, soppin up my mama’s gravy with my daddy’s biscuits. Sittin there and promisin how good you would treat me forever.”

He downed the rest of the beer and set the can gently on the table. “Forever ain’t as long as it used to be.” He walked away. “I be seein you.”

It was Tommy Carson’s father who told Kenyon it might be time for him to move on. A week before the school year started, he knocked on Georgia’s door and Kenyon came down and Moses said how their arguing and fighting had kept his new baby up all the night before.

“We pay our rent, thas all I know,” Kenyon said. The two men had rarely spoken before. It was early, and Kenyon had had only a little taste of something and was feeling not unhappy and he was rather disappointed that there had not been good news at the door, as the liquor had been promising him as he came singing down the stairs.

“It ain’t got to do with payin rent, man,” Moses said. Kenyon was standing in his doorway and Moses was standing one step down on the stoop. Lois was just inside her door, her baby in her arms and Tommy and his brother behind her. “It got to do with all this noise you and your woman makin practically every night.” Georgia was standing at the top of the stairs. “Whas goin on, honey?” she asked Kenyon, who ignored her.

“I don’t tell you how to act with your woman, and you don’t tell me how to act with mine.”

“Just watch the noise, is all,” Moses said and turned away.

“I ain’t finished talkin,” Kenyon said and grabbed Moses’s shoulder, turning him half around before punching him in the face. Lois screamed and her baby began crying to see her mother’s distress. Moses blocked the second punch and hit Kenyon as hard as he could in the stomach, then managed a quick one to the jaw, and Kenyon fell back on the stairs. Georgia screamed, “Honey, be careful!” Lois handed the baby to Tommy and came out. Moses reached in to Kenyon’s place and was set to give him a solid one to his nose, but Kenyon raised his arms to cover his face and his whole body shook. Kenyon said nothing, just crossed his arms at the wrists. He was a pretty man, Moses could see now that they were so close, and his face was everything. It was the pretty men, Moses thought, who made it such a bad world. The pretty men and their puppy-hearted women. Georgia screamed that he should let her man be. Kenyon kept his hands up before his face and Lois told her husband to step away. “Back off, Moses, I’m tellin you! Just back off!”

All through the Labor Day weekend, the children on Ridge Street talked about the fight that none of them had actually witnessed and only Tommy and his brother had heard. Tommy’s father had won hands down, they all decided. The children of ten years and under reenacted the fight with wrestling, and no one wanted to be Kenyon because he was destined to lose. If a boy playing Kenyon happened to wrestle a victory, he was accused of not playing fair, because the rules of a reenactment dictated that Kenyon be the loser. “I don’t wanna play with you no more,” the losing Moses would say. “You ain’t doin it right.” “I gotta win sometime,” the winning Kenyon would say. “You get to win all the time. I don’t like that.” “Tough titty.”

Amy had been fine for more than two weeks, but the night before school started she dreamed again that Georgia was coming to get her. This time her father came up beside Georgia and together they took off after the girl. Abe heard her in the night and went and put her in the bed beside Idabelle and then went downstairs to sleep on the couch. Idabelle thought her daughter would not be able to go to school, but the next day Amy said she wanted to go.

She entered the third grade, and Carlos was disappointed that she was not in his class at Walker-Jones. It had been one of his greatest hopes during the summer. Please, please, he had prayed to God, put us in the same room. Pretty pretty please. He always thought of himself as a good boy, despite what his mother and father sometimes said. If he had something to trade to God, he thought his prayers would have been answered. He was a curser and he promised God not to do it anymore, but God was not impressed.

The first Saturday after school started, he had just split an orange Popsicle with Tommy on Carlos’s side of the street when they saw Kenyon chase Georgia out of their place and down Ridge Street toward 4th Street. Ethel saw them, and so did Amy and Billie and Larry Comstock’s younger brother. The men working in the garage across from Georgia came out and watched. Amy backed away toward her door. Kenyon caught Georgia two doors from Amy, just about when Judy came across the street with her walking stick. Kenyon slapped Georgia twice before Judy knocked him once in the head with the stick. Georgia crawled away toward Amy and Amy opened her door and Georgia crawled inside. Idabelle came out and stood with Judy, and Moses, Tommy’s father, came out, with Lois following with their baby, and he stood on the other side of Kenyon as the man raised his hands in a I-don’t-want-no-trouble-with-yall fashion. Kenyon went back to his place. Georgia went back three hours later, and they were quiet for the rest of the weekend and for a few weeks after. They walked about arm in arm, as they had in the first days of their relationship. They had long ago become known as common-law wife Georgia and her common-law husband Kenyon, though a few people held back and said two years, not several months, was the mark of such a marriage.

They went out to the What Ailing Ya one evening in October, not long before the schoolchildren got Columbus Day off, and got to fighting outside the beer garden after Kenyon claimed he saw her winking at a man nicknamed Frisky Fred. This man went to Baltimore, sometimes even to Philadelphia, to have his hair processed so he could come back and tell people in D.C. that the process was his own natural good hair. The police were called on Kenyon and Georgia. It was the first time ever that anyone had called the law on them, and it would be the last. They took Georgia just a block up 5th Street to the Women’s Bureau, and Kenyon just down 5th to the Number 2 Precinct. She got sick during the night, and though she called for one, said her head was killing her, no one brought her a Stanback. About six in the morning the woman with whom she was sharing the cell, a nightclub singer who had forged three Post Office money orders, got tired of Georgia calling for “my Kenyon” and made up a song on the spot that all the other women in their cells took up and sang until it was time for breakfast. When one part of the cell block would flag with the song, another would take it up and the song would continue again for some time.

Oh my Kenyon, where is my boy?

Oh my Kenyon, you done took my joy.

Oh, Kenny, my pretty face is all yours

Play with that face, Kenny, like you do all your toys.

By seven, before the sun came up, Georgia was cursing them all, and then, not long before eight, she was crying and asking of no one in particular why they wanted to hurt her damn feelings when they didn’t even know her, didn’t even know what her life was like.

She got back home about three in the afternoon, walked right across 5th and into Ridge Street. From the jail, she had managed to get ahold of Cornelia’s neighbor just before noon, and the neighbor told Cornelia, who didn’t have a telephone. Cornelia had come over and bailed her out. “This the first time I ever been in that place,” Georgia said of the Women’s Bureau. “The first time for me, too,” said Cornelia, who had left Lydia with the neighbor because she didn’t want her child getting too familiar with the law.

Kenyon did not come back. That morning he had returned from jail and gotten most of his clothes and disappeared. Georgia wondered why he left, and put the word out everywhere that she was looking for him, that they should talk things over. School and all else went on for the children, and Carlos’s love for Amy did not falter. Her bad dreams were still there, but she was learning that when Georgia and her father came for her in them, she could hide behind a talking tree that lied and told them Amy had gone way over there. The big subject among the children as October came to an end was of the men who played the Lone Ranger and Tonto on the television coming to D.C. four days before Halloween. Their horses Silver and Scout would even be there, or so the rumor went. But when adults saw the children of Ridge Street getting excited about going to see them, they let them know that the theater where the Lone Ranger and Tonto would be appearing would not let colored children in. “What a gyp!” the kids responded. “Dag!”

Somehow the song composed that night by the nightclub singer made its way out of the Women’s Bureau, across 5th and all along Ridge Street. Girls jumped rope to it. Georgia heard them, could not help but hear them as she went on with life in her apartment and the girls played outside her window, not really knowing what they were saying but happy with something that they could jump rope to. The song was fine for jumping single rope but with double Dutch the rhythm suffered except with the most expert of girls. Day by painful day Georgia would take something of his that was in her way and put it aside in a closet in the second bedroom.

Carlos and Amy and Billie and Tommy and Ethel and a few others were playing on Ridge near 4th that Saturday in November when Kenyon came up 4th and turned onto Ridge. He was in a suit few chauffeurs could afford, and he had not been drinking. Amy saw him first. The street was busy that day, women sweeping the sidewalk and cleaning their windows and men gossiping and washing their cars and just generally showing off. Amy stood up from her jacks game and watched him walking down the middle of the street, avoiding either sidewalk. Almost as soon as the other children saw what she was looking at, the girl fainted and Carlos and Billie, who was now free of his cast, caught her and lowered her bit by bit to the ground. Carlos was not afraid this time, because he knew fainting was a long way from dying. Ethel called Amy by name and sat down beside her, dropping the jacks ball, which rolled away into the gutter. Tommy ran to get Idabelle.

Carlos watched Kenyon come toward them, and then, not knowing what else to do, he came out to the street and got up onto William McGavin’s new Chevrolet and put his hands to his mouth, megaphone-style. “Boo boo boo!” he shouted. He felt better with each second. Seeing him up there, the other children took up the cry, some of them not having even seen Kenyon and thinking it was all just another of Carlos’s games, and some of them actually seeing Kenyon and just not liking the man who beat up Miss Georgia and then got beat up by Tommy’s father.

“Boo boo boo!” the children shouted.

Kenyon came nearer to Carlos, came within a foot of him and raised his hand as if to swat him. Carlos fell back but went on shouting. “Boo boo boo!” Idabelle came running, followed by Matthew and Abe, and they found Amy waking up. Kenyon continued on down the middle of the street, and more children were shouting. Carlos saw Judy five or six doors down come out of her house and he called to her. She and other adults began to fill the street and Kenyon found himself having to maneuver through a growing crowd. Carlos and Judy looked at each other until she turned her head to see Georgia, four doors down and across Ridge, open her door and step out on the stoop to find out what all the commotion was about. The two women stared at each other and Judy began her own booing, a weak, self-conscious cry.

William McGavin came out of his house and saw Carlos on his new car. “Boy, your daddy ain’t got anough to fix anything you might break! Get on down from there,” and he raised his arms and Carlos sailed into them and took off up the street behind Kenyon and the crowd. “Boo boo boo!” He pushed his way through to get closer to Kenyon, who was slowing. Then about midway up the block, Kenyon could see Georgia, who had not gone beyond her stoop. She saw him but did not come down the stairs to the sidewalk. Some children near her were crying “Boo!” at whoever was near, and some of them directed “Boo!”s at her. Anyone who knew her could see the difference in her face, the way the nose was off to the side from where it had been all her life, the little bump at the edge of her lip, engorged with blood months ago and now full of something part blood, part pus, and part bile that had traveled to the lip from some distant place in her body. Kenyon looked at Georgia and Georgia looked at Kenyon. He noticed that she had cut her hair. She knew full well that he hated short hair.

The crowd became too thick for Kenyon to move, and he turned around to see Matthew carrying Amy back to the house. Abe was a step behind him, but Idabelle was standing on the sidewalk watching Kenyon, who started back toward 4th Street. The crowd made way. He got to 4th Street and turned the corner and the children and the grown-ups stopped following him but continued to shout “Boo”s and each one rained down upon him.

Once fully on 4th heading toward M, he was free of them. He stopped mid-block and remembered that he had been two months sober. He felt weak, and at 4th and M he went into Leon’s to buy two bottles of Rock Creek cream soda. He opened both bottles on the opener attached to the cooler and kept one bottle in the bag and drank the other as he came out of the store. He looked down M Street to where New York Avenue ran right into New Jersey Avenue. On that corner where he stood, wobbly, 4th took a dip and continued to dip all the way to K Street. Farther up M was 5th Street and What Ailing Ya. He went down 4th, drinking the soda. He remembered that there was a store at 4th and L. The two sodas he had would last him until he could reach that store and fortify himself with two more. The problem would be if that store didn’t have cream soda. What would he do after that? What would he do?

The people on Ridge Street became afraid that Kenyon would come back and hurt Georgia, so they started looking out for her, driving her to and from work. Throughout the rest of 1955, the big liar Larry Comstock’s twenty-three-year-old cousin, only one year out of Tennessee, got the job of taking her to work. He was Randy Comstock, and he had become engaged to a young woman whose family had lost their home in Georgetown when the city and federal government people forced all the colored people out of there and brought in the white people. Randy liked to talk and Georgia enjoyed listening to him.

One day near the end of December, he started in talking about the life he and his fiancée were planning in a house on South Dakota Avenue in upper Northeast. “It’s a nice house, Miss Georgia…Real nice. You should see it sometime. I figure we can be happy there with one, maybe two kids, then after that, if we have any more, we can move up to somethin bigger. We got plans, Miss Georgia, we got real good plans, and I figure the sky’s the limit.” He was a cautious driver, both hands on the wheel where they should be, as Judy knew before she picked him to drive Georgia. “Now Irma, she want three kids, Miss Georgia. I say four. I want four cause thas a nice number. My mama and pappy had four children, and each of their mamas and pappies had four children, so I figure thas good anough for me. But Irma…Well, I don’t know…I will have to defer to Irma on that score. A real man has to defer to his wife on such matters, thas what my pappy told me. But I think I can live with three kids. You think I can live with three kids, huh, Miss Georgia? You think three kids will suit me?”

Georgia was one and a half years from marrying Alvin Deloach. She was more than eight years from marrying Vaughn Anderson, who would worship the ground she walked on, but that was not the kind of love she was used to. “I think three children will do me quite well, Miss Georgia.” She was nearly twenty years from going to Israel with Cornelia and Lydia, who would not be a doctor but who would make more money than all her ancestors put together, all of them, all the way back to Eve. “A real man can defer to his wife and still be a real man, is what I say, Miss Georgia.” She was just about thirty years from seeing her first grandchild come into the world. “A little give and a little take make a good marriage, my mama always said.” She was more than forty and a half years from death.