All Aunt Hagar's Children

THE DEVIL SWIMS ACROSS THE ANACOSTIA RIVER

Some fourteen years after her grandmother walked out into the Atlantic Ocean on her way to heaven, Laverne Shepherd went into the Safeway on Good Hope Road, S.E., and for the first time came face-to-face with the Devil. That morning in the store, she had, like so many times before, taken a shopping cart from just inside the door and maneuvered it to the aisle farthest to the left. She neared a face-high display of canned pinto beans and glanced at a short shopping list after she took it from her sweater pocket, and when she looked up from the list of four or so items, the Devil was before her. She stopped, not out of fear, but because to go any farther would have meant running into him with the cart. “Himself been studyin you,” the Devil said. Laverne looked down at her wedding ring on the hand resting on the cart’s handle, and when she raised her eyes, the Devil was taking off his hat, in that dramatic way men did in old movies to impress women who needed very little impressing.

The Devil was dressed in a splendid gray gabardine suit, and down through the metal rods of the empty cart Laverne could see that on feet small enough to belong to a little girl, he wore two-tone, black-and-white shoes. The knot of his purple tie was situated just so to the left of his Adam’s apple, as if he had dressed himself without the benefit of a mirror. There was an almost boyish quality to the off-center knot, and for a moment Laverne thought it would have been the most natural thing in the world for a woman, any woman, to reach over and center the knot and end the whole gesture with a final tap of the finger on the knot. There…That’ll do you for a while… The tie was held in place against his white shirt with a ruby tie clip, about the size of a candy fireball.

Himself been studyin you,” the Devil said again, now smiling. All the teeth in his head were perfect, exquisite white marvels that were an artwork all their own. A woman could spend all day and part of the next just laying about looking at them. Turn a little bit and lemme see how the light shine on em that way… Both her grandmothers had come to know the Devil so well that he, in all his guises, called them always by their childhood nicknames. At various times in her life, Laverne’s grandmothers had tried to tell her how she would know the Devil that first time. It will be, they had explained as best they could, the way you know that you are hungry or that you are thirsty: the body will say it and you will take it as gospel. But they had not told her what to say, what to do, whether to run or go forward and attack him with the fury of an angel doing God’s work.

Once more the Devil said, “Himself been studyin you.” He came toward her and as he did he lowered the arm with the hat down to his side. The fedora was the same pleasing gray as his gabardine suit. The Devil himself was the color of an everyday brown paper bag. He rested a hand on the side of the cart, less than a foot from where her wedding ring hand was resting, and turned down his smile a few degrees, turned it down in disappointment, as if he had come upon a long-lost friend and the friend had denied knowing him.

“What?” Laverne said. “What?” She was nine weeks pregnant with her second child, happy in all things, happy in her twenty-fifth year of life.

The Devil said, “Himself come all this way, come all the way cross the river, swim all the way cross that Anacostia. Himself swim all that way to say ‘Good mornin’ and say ‘Hi you do?’”

She was still not afraid but looked about, mostly with a strange wonder that they were at last together, and together in such an odd and bright place of food and people and things to clean the kitchen floor with. Only here only at Safeway can you get the best bargain for your dollars…The sign on the display of canned pinto beans said eight for a dollar. It occurred to Laverne that that might be a particularly good price, but she could not remember if her husband or son liked pinto beans. It was when she looked back at the Devil that the smell of him came drifting her way, a nonthreatening fragrance that didn’t mind taking all the time it needed to get to her. It was a wonderful though subtle cologne that for Laverne simply said everything good about men. No doubt, the man in the apartment downstairs from hers had a similar smell, though when that man washed his car in his T-shirt and shorts there was just the sweat, or so she thought as she looked down at him from behind her curtain. Look up this way. Don’t look up here… She had not yet gotten close to the man downstairs and so could only imagine how he smelled as he stepped out of his apartment dressed to kill and went to his car with yet another new woman on his arm and opened his car door for the woman and watched her take her sophisticated time settling down on his bucket seat. A final look up at the man before he shut the door. Her husband believed that a man did not have to perfume himself as long as he bathed every day. It would be her luck, she thought, if there were no specials on Dial soap that day. “Himself been studyin you,” the Devil said, quietly now, as if he were sharing the great secret of her life.

Laverne stepped away from the Devil and the cart and walked uneasily out of the Safeway.

On dishrag legs, she made her way a block and a half up Good Hope Road, and on a bench in front of Cleopatra’s Hair Emporium, she sat, the crumpled shopping list in her left hand resting on the green bench. She was back in the world, back in life, and was so glad that she felt like reaching out and touching a body or two passing by the Emporium. Two women went into Cleopatra’s, and one of the women was saying she really wanted some bangs, but her companion told her bangs would make her face look fat. “But I really want them bangs,” the first woman insisted before they closed the door to the Emporium. Laverne crossed her legs and with the tips of her fingers rearranged her skirt down over her legs. Himself been studyin you… For the third time that morning she wished she had not stopped smoking. It was near about twelve o’clock.

She considered calling her mother, or her mother’s wealthy mother, who had known the Devil mostly in his guise of an old woman for nearly sixty years. She turned her head and looked into the window of the beauty parlor. The woman who wanted the bangs was being seated in a chair two seats from the window. In the chair at the window was an old woman who was getting her black hair unfurled from light blue curlers; standing beside the woman was a little girl who could have been the woman’s granddaughter. The girl’s hair was done up quite nicely and she seemed to be watching the old woman and her hair as if to make certain that the same care was given to her grandmother. The woman who wanted the bangs was talking, talking a mile a minute to Cleopatra, who waded through the woman’s hair with her fingers in preparation for the job ahead. Laverne’s mother would be back from confession and mass by now. She went to church every day. Laverne could see herself getting up, putting the dime into the pay phone next to the beauty shop, could see herself dialing her mother’s number and hearing the promising ring, but she could not see beyond that.

She had, after the birth of her son, tried to do good to put off as long as possible this day, the day of meeting the Devil. Sending money to the Salvation Army. Going to church every week until all that singing and preaching began to depress her. Trying to banish impure thoughts. And in the last place they had lived, on Maple View, she had befriended a dying man, Mansfield Harper, had even held his hand in those moments before he died the evening Mansfield’s woman had stepped away on an errand. His fingers had wiggled there at the end and, because she had not known Mansfield’s sins, Laverne had thought the wiggling meant he was on his way to heaven. But all that good had not put off this day.

She had paid little attention to the story that the Devil had a special thing for the women on both sides of her family, a thing born with Eve. It was said that all the women in her family had the answer to a riddle that would make the Devil the King of Heaven. All he had to do was pose the riddle in the right way to the right woman, alive or dead, and the answer would send God tumbling from his throne and down to the narrow perch the Devil had been consigned to for all history. And so the Devil had sought out all the women in her family, sought out millennia of women who had known the big and small of life before Laverne but who had failed to tell the Devil the answer of the ages. Laverne’s great-aunt’s grandmother had said that if the Devil could get the right woman in hell, he would have an eternity, small time for him, to get what he wanted. Morning after morning, that grandmother had said, he could wake the right woman on her bed of fire and ask about the answer.

Now the Devil had knocked at her door.

Laverne looked at the shopping list and then put it back in her sweater pocket and patted the pocket. She lived to dance, lived to party, even though her mother liked to remind her that she was now married with a child and another waiting in the wings. A friend across the Anacostia River in Northwest was giving a party that Saturday night and it was all Laverne had been able to think about for days. She tried not to place herself in the middle of the party, abandoning herself the way she was known to do, sweating gloriously from all the dancing with black men made to make her knees buckle. Her husband was a dancer, too, had met her on a dance floor in someone’s apartment, but he had long since stopped trying to keep up with Laverne. He sent her off and told her go and be happy. She labored now to put herself on the floor of the party to come that night, but once more she could not place herself where she wanted.

A car going up Good Hope Road tooted its horn at her, but she did not hear it. Her mother said all Anacostia seemed to know her. After several minutes she closed her eyes and took herself down Good Hope, across the bridge and out through Washington, through Maryland until she was on the August beach fourteen years ago, the Atlantic Ocean only a few yards away and the heat waves shimmering all along the dull blue horizon, one seagull conversing with another. She was wearing her cousin’s bathing suit and sitting on the beach with her feet dug into the sand, snuggled close to her paternal grandmother, who was in her afterchurch, all-day Sunday dress. And on the other side of the grandmother were Laverne’s brothers, boys of eight and five years. Laverne’s father and mother had gone to a refreshment stand near the parking lot to buy snacks. The beach was full of colored people.

What her grandmother had heard before she was compelled to stand up, Laverne never knew, but once her grandmother did stand up, the voice was clear for all the Negroes along the beach to hear. Only her grandmother, after putting on her shoes, moved toward the water and the voice. And, as if there were a silent command, those Negroes who had been swimming came out of the water and looked at the horizon, from where the voice was coming. There was a kind of roar that seemed to ascend from the ocean, and another roar that seemed to descend from the sky, and there at eye level, the roars became words. The voice, emphatically clear and distinct, was not female and it was not male.

Laverne’s grandmother hesitated, stopping a yard or more from the water, and the voice, without rebuke, asked the grandmother, “Did you come all this way to lose your faith, to drop down into the bottom of the sea? Ahead of you is this water and behind you he’s coming? Did you lose your faith?”

“No,” her grandmother said. “No. I stand on my two feet.” Before she set off again, she turned around and from her pocketbook pulled out three ten-dollar bills. She gave one to each of her grandchildren, which was unusual for a woman who had never given them more than fifty cents at any one time, lest they be corrupted. Laverne’s youngest brother, a boy of easy giggles, looked suspiciously at the ten-dollar bill; he was still at an age where he did not trust paper money. It could tear; it could burn; it could fly away with the wind. But he folded the bill as small as he could and tucked it into the pocket of his swimming trunks. Laverne’s grandmother set off again and the youngest brother said, “Granny, you gon ruin your pretty shoes in all that water.”

Their grandmother looked down, somewhat worried, as if deciding between her $12.95 Hahn’s shoes and the command of the voice of the universe. “We have waited since the first day,” the voice said with the greatest patience. “Have you not waited since the first day?” the voice said with the greatest patience. “Have you not waited with us?” Their grandmother turned and looked at the boy, dark-skinned, bony, painfully perfect. He waved though they were but a few yards apart. After several moments, she took a step and was standing where water met dry sand. She stopped, her brown patent leather pocketbook hanging from her left arm. Then, in a few more steps, she was standing a foot above the bottom of the sea. She continued walking, one uncertain step after another. All the Negroes along the beach were quiet, so that the loudest sound when the voice was silent was the ocean hitting the beach and then retreating.

By now, Laverne’s mother and father were back, followed by a lifeguard who was looking about as if there was something that would make more sense than an old woman walking on water. Laverne’s father watched until his mother was about five yards out on the water, and then he said, “Mama.”

Haltingly, Laverne’s grandmother turned around for the first and only time. “Ain’t I always told you it might come to this?” she told her son. “I’ve done nothin that I couldn’t clean up by the next day. And it was hard, but now I wanna go and complain to somebody about it. Then shut up for good.” Then she said to Laverne’s mother, “Cheryl, you try to splain it to him. Just to let him know. I got somethin I have to do right now.” Laverne’s father moved toward the ocean. He was crying but did not speak. He was joined by his wife and she was followed by the lifeguard. The children had not moved since their grandmother handed them the money.

The grandmother set off again. With each step, all the Negroes on the beach could see that she was gaining confidence. Still, the lifeguard, when the grandmother was more than twenty yards out into the sea, shouted to her with complete sincerity, “Ma’am, you all right out there? You need some help?” He was eighteen.

Not stopping, the grandmother raised her right arm and wiggled her fingers that she was fine. For all the purpose and certainty of her step, she could have been walking down 7th Street on her way to St. Aloysius Catholic Church. There was nothing on the ocean and the horizon except the old woman, not a boat, not a buoy, and even the seagulls had disappeared from the air. When the grandmother was but a foot tall on the sea, her son sat down on the beach and refused to look anymore. When the grandmother was an inch or so, Laverne walked to the ocean’s edge and raised a hand to shade her eyes, and her youngest brother came up beside her and put his hand in hers. The other brother took a place beside his father. Then, in the time it took to sigh, the grandmother was gone completely.

There was no more of that day for anyone, even though the sun was way up in the sky, and little by little the Negroes collected what they had brought to the beach and went back to their cars and buses. Now and again a stranger would come up to Laverne or a member of her family. The strangers did not speak but simply touched a shoulder or hand in sympathy, in understanding. Laverne felt no sadness and she slowly began to fear that she had not loved her grandmother as much as the old woman had always said she loved her. The family’s eyes stayed focused on the horizon where the grandmother had disappeared, and Laverne and her family remained on the beach until well after the sun was down, accompanied only by the lifeguard, who had caught a chill but who felt it was his duty to stay with them.

She opened her eyes and looked about at the world of Anacostia. A woman and man holding hands walked by her. “I told you not to buy that kind,” the woman said to the man. “I told you you’d be sorry.” “I don’t know what I was thinkin,” the man said. “I musta been crazy.” Laverne had been born and raised in Anacostia. After Anacostia High, after her first job at Woodward & Lothrop, she had wanted to move across the river where she believed the real Washington had been waiting all those years for her to grow up and come over and be a woman people could not stop talking about. They would say wonderful things about her, about how a party wasn’t a party until she arrived. They would say she was loyal to her friends. That was about the extent of all the wonderful things she imagined people saying about her, something one man pointed out to her. She fell in love with him. He said he had gone to high school with her but she did not remember him. That man, Mason, did not want to move across the river, and six years ago when they married she said that was fine. Washington across the river had not stopped telling her that she was missing so much by living in that Anacostia place where people had molasses in their blood. People were still waiting to say glorious things about her, the city said.

She took out the shopping list. Some cookies for her son, shaving cream for her husband, just enough to carry up the hill and not tire herself. Some time away from them on a busy Saturday. A car’s horn tooted, and a woman shouted out the window, “Vernie, Vernie. See you tonight.” The car was gone before she could say Yes, yes, they would see her. Her family would be waiting at Sears, Roebuck and Co. on Alabama Avenue—still another pair of pants for the boy, a tie for her husband and his assistant manager job at Murphy’s Five and Dime Store. She looked down at her body. In a few months she would start to show. Should she buy new maternity clothes or settle for what was left over from her first pregnancy? “Styles don’t matter when you’re pregnant,” her mother had once said. The dancing would have to stop for a while. That would be difficult. The best time she ever had at a party she had when she was three months pregnant with her son. An all-night thing where she had sweated through her clothes and every man she danced with told her the sweat just added to the beat. “Gimme, gimme,” said one man, who was drunk but didn’t show it, and she had shaken her head and watched him close his eyes and open his mouth to receive a few drops of sweat. “Mother’s milk,” the man said. Her husband had slow danced with her but mostly he stood on the party-giver’s balcony looking down toward the Monument and talking to a woman whose mouth was wired shut because of an accident. Laverne had thought her son would inherit her love of dancing from her, but he was as clumsy as her husband. Her husband had been born with three webbed toes on his left foot. The boy was free of that.

She stood up from the bench, more annoyed than anything else that the Devil stood between her and a fairly perfect day of shopping and partying. The mind had to be uncluttered to enjoy a party. Why had he waited until she was twenty-five to come to see her? The paternal grandmother who had walked into the Atlantic Ocean had first met the Devil when she was five years old; a schoolbook under her arm, she had turned onto a red country road in Georgia and there he was, ugly as homemade soap with next to no teeth, just done with doing it to her grandmother’s cousin and both of them covered with the dust of the road. “I just got tired of his beggin all the time,” the cousin would say later. And he had come to her maternal grandmother when she was thirteen, wrapped in a long yellow shawl that dragged along in the upstate New York snow. As far as Laverne knew, he had never come to her mother, but she could not be certain because the Devil was not something her mother talked about to any of the women in her family. He was forever on the women’s minds, but Laverne had tried to live in a different world. Now, riding her annoyance, she wished she had picked up a trick or two for dispelling him, for getting on with the rest of her life.

Back in the Safeway, he was standing just as she had left him and he waved her over as soon as she was in the store. “Himself been waitin,” he said. “Himself swim all the way over that Anacostia River.”

“I know. You told me once. I’m not deaf.” Laverne got the cart. The grandmother and the girl from the beauty parlor came behind her and the woman told the girl to get a cart. “Make sure it’s a good one,” the woman said. “You didn’t get a good one the last time.” They moved off to the right.

“No, no. Himself would never cuse you of that. To be deaf, to be blind,” he said, setting his hat back on his head, “would not be how himself wants things for you.” She noticed that one of his incisors was the brightest gold. As a girl, she had believed that men with gold teeth had gotten them by drinking too much beer. No one in her neighborhood had nice things to say about such men.

“I don’t want none a what you sellin today,” she said.

“Himself ain’t sellin,” he said, stepping to the front of the cart to get her attention. “Himself ain’t buyin or sellin right now. Thas all a long way from himself’s mind. You can believe that.”

He did have a pleasantness about him. She took the cart to the left, toward the fruits and vegetables, and the Devil followed, in step beside her. The colorful array of the produce seemed especially dazzling today. When he was younger, she liked to have her son name the colors as the two of them shopped; he was more inclined to eat squash after he had stood in the Safeway aisle and held it by the green stem and called it a yellow fellow over and over again. She could see her son now, standing with the towel about him, just after his bath, soft and brown and waiting for his kisses. She turned to look over her shoulder, as if the boy, holding his father’s hand, might be just outside the window. She looked into the Devil’s face and he said, “When bout is your baby due?” His fragrance swirled about her and she thought that maybe he wasn’t who her mind told her he was, but was only some man with tiny feet out to romance her.

“What?” she said. Some men liked pregnant women, could sense their condition even when, like her, they were not showing.

“When your baby due?”

“What’s it to you? It ain’t your baby.”

“Just passin the time with a beautiful woman, is all. Can’t himself do that?”

“Himself can do whatever he pleases.” She reached the end of the aisle and turned the cart to the right, stopping at the head of the aisle with sodas. Was there some small store between here and where her husband and son were waiting? Nothing really had to begin and end with the Safeway. Could she leave and end this? But she said, “In seven months. My baby’s due in about seven months.”

“See? That whatn’t so hard,” the Devil said. “That mean a October baby. Nothin pleases himself more than October babies. They so…” and he stopped, and because she wanted to know what he had to say, she stopped after a couple of feet as well. “They so accommodatin, them October babies. Himself ain’t never met a October baby yet that didn’t like him. October is one big accommodatin month, all thirty-one days.”

“My baby won’t be accommodating to anything,” Laverne said, moving on.

“He has to be, Miss Laverne. If he born in October, he has to be accommodatin to himself.”

“I don’t care what you say.” She knew there was something in that aisle she needed but couldn’t remember what it was. She stood before two shelves of canned and bottled Pepsi-Cola. Why wasn’t the Dial soap here like it was supposed to be, so she could use it to dial her mother and ask if her husband and son liked pinto beans? Who would know better than her own mother about Safeway specials? “You say that like bein born in October is some kinda bad thing.”

“Himself didn’t say that. Himself didn’t say anything bad about October.”

“My child will have October to be happy and not be accommodating to you or anyone else.” She picked up a large bottle of soda. The price said thirty-five cents. Should I buy it? What was it last week?

“Himself knows that. Please. Please, Miss Laverne. Himself wants all October babies to be happy. Himself told you—Octobers like himself. They don’t cuss himself; they don’t tell himself to get thee back, get way back in the line like some do. Like them April babies.”

“Why are you doin this to me?”

“Aprils are so disrespectful. April got thirty days too many. April would be a perfect month if it had only one day. And October should have thirty-one more days. Give October all April’s days and see what a good world we would have then, Miss Laverne.” Laverne put the soda back. “Why, ain’t it that your grandmother was born in October?”

She looked at him. He was talking about her mother’s mother, the one in her giant house on the Gold Coast on Crittenden Street, a place she hated for people to call a mansion. Her grandmother had torn down the two large houses originally on two plots of land and built herself the biggest in that area, to the ire of the wealthy blacks around her who usually had nothing bad to say about the ostentatious. She had four fireplaces in that house and they all burned every day of the year.

“All himself is sayin is that October has good things to recommend it. And soon it’ll have Laverne’s new baby to recommend. Thas all himself is sayin.” He touched his hand to his heart. “Please, Miss Laverne, les not dirty the sweet month of October here in the Safeway. Please, Miss Laverne.”

“My grandmother has nothin to do with any of this.” She went on and turned onto an aisle with canned goods. “I’m not my grandmother.”

“If Miss Laverne says so, then himself says so, too.” He came up close beside her again. “Which one, Miss Laverne?”

She ignored him. She remembered the eight cans of pinto beans for one dollar. Could she carry all eight cans up the hill? It would be just like her husband to get tired of them after only the second can. Heading out with her son one trash day morning, she had seen the trash can of the man downstairs on the sidewalk, the top leaning against the side of the can. On top of the pile was an empty tray that had held some red meat, perhaps hamburger. Was he a good cook? she had wondered. What did he specialize in? Did he do lasagna? There was an empty package of Oreos, a few black crumbs huddled in one corner. The top of a liquor bottle was poking up as well, and had she not been trying to get her son to school, she would have picked it up to see what brand he drank.

“Himself asks, which one?”

“I only want to be left alone,” she said and began to walk quickly. But a man, reading a label on a can, was before her with his cart and she had to slow to make her way around him. The man had the can very close to his face, and as she approached he looked at her and back at the can and then back to her. He seemed to want to ask her for help but he put the can to his face again and finally settled for tossing the can into his empty cart. Once they were around the man the Devil was at her side again. He began to hum, and with each note she calmed so that by the time they reached the end of the aisle, she wanted to know what he was humming. The fireplace on the second floor of her grandmother’s house, the one nearest 16th Street, was the most inviting, created just for cold rainy days and hot chocolate and stories about people who had met death up in a snowstorm and survived. Her mother had never seen the house on Crittenden Street, had never seen her portrait hanging over the first-floor fireplace.

They turned onto another aisle, this one with more canned goods, including canned juices. “Which one?” the Devil asked. She feared that pulling out the shopping list would make her seem weak. “Himself asks, which one?”

“What do you want?”

“Just to know which one?”

“Which one?” Laverne said.

“Which grandmother ain’t you like? The one with all the money and the fine house and the fine clothes or that one that pulled that trick on the beach that day? The one livin high on the hog or the one call herself walkin on water?”

“It whatn’t no trick,” Laverne said. She remembered now that her son wanted cookies. But which kind? He could be as fussy about things as his father. She herself liked vanilla creams, but last time the Safeway was out of them. “We’ll be sure to have them for you the next time, ma’am,” some assistant manager had told her.

“But it was a trick, Miss Laverne. You know. Himself knows. And that granny of yours know it, lyin down on the sea bottom like she is.”

She stopped. “You shut the hell up. It wasn’t a trick. I was there. I know.”

“Himself was there, too, Miss Laverne. Himself always there.” He stepped so she could see him fully in the face. The tie was still off-center, and she still wanted to center it. Would he take her hand and kiss it if she did? Would he take her hand and ask her how he could become King of Heaven?

“You weren’t nowhere.”

The Devil turned and picked up a can of Hi-C orange drink from the middle shelf across from them. “He has ruled all of them with all them tricks a his. Don’t let him do that to you, Miss Laverne.” A man in a Safeway smock was walking toward them. The Devil held the can in his left hand, and looking at her, he raised his right hand three inches or so above the can and brought his index finger down to the top of the can. “Tricks, tricks, tricks. Mornin, noon, and night. Himself gets so tired of all them tricks. Himself thought you was better than to believe in tricks, Miss Laverne.” The Safeway man stopped a few feet before them. The Devil wiggled his finger twice and then, ever so slowly, the finger went down through the top of the can. Laverne and the Safeway man did not move. “Tricks. Even a new October baby can do a trick.” He pulled his finger out and licked the juice from it, then plunged it down so that there was another hole next to the first. “Nature abhors a vacuum.” He pulled it out again and wiped it on the man’s smock, just to the side of his name tag. The Devil upended the can and poured juice on the floor and handed the can to the Safeway man. “Watch himself walk on water fortified with vitamin C.” He walked back and forth over the juice on the floor. “Now,” he said to Laverne, “you can call himself god. Watch himself a few aisles over from here when himself multiply all them fishes and all them loaves. Watch himself, Miss Laverne, and then bow down and worship himself, Miss Laverne, if all it takes is tricks.”

“She did no tricks,” Laverne said. Gingerly, she moved over the juice. “She was good and that is how she did it.”

“Young fellow,” the Devil said to the Safeway man, “himself is from headquarters. All the way from headquarters in Oakland, California. What they learn you bout liquids on a Safeway floor?” The man nodded and went around Laverne and out to the side door.

At the end of the aisle Laverne turned onto the one with the cookies and other sweets. Her grandmother had loved her, had said so each time they were together, at the beginning of a meeting and at the end. She tried to remember her grandmother’s voice now, the confidence in the voice as she walked out into the sea. Had she told Laverne she loved her that Sunday? Had she gone out into the water before telling her, “I love you, child, and don’t you ever forget it”? No, she hadn’t said it. Had she stopped loving her before she set off? Had her grandmother set off for heaven and not blessed Laverne with her love?

She remembered now that her son liked Nilla Wafers. Were those wafers so far from the vanilla creams she liked? Why did her son adore those wafers, but turn his nose up at the creams? Were they not of the same family? I love you, Grandma. She moved down the aisle and just before the midway point she felt the Devil behind her. She stopped at the Oreos. She had guessed that the man downstairs was a man for Oreos. The darkness of Oreos had a mystery, too. She had awakened one night not long ago and heard a woman being pleasured and she knew right away that the man downstairs was responsible. She picked up a package of Oreos and could hear the woman moaning. She had lain quiet beside her husband, afraid that he could hear her heart beating, afraid that the moaning woman would wake him and he would turn to Laverne and know her heart at that moment.

“He dreams of you,” the Devil said. “He lay down every night with a different woman, but in his secret dreams, you walk up to him on some beach downstairs and he renounces everyone but you. Did you know he dreams of you? He downstairs and he can hear you walkin around upstairs, livin your life, and he thinks and thinks and then when he sleeps, there you be.”

“I don’t care,” Laverne said and returned the package to the shelf. “I don’t care nothin bout that.”

“Then how come it is that last night when you come, you come with him in mind? How come that be, Miss Laverne?”

“You don’t know me.” She reached for the Nilla Wafers. She picked up a box, but decided that an identical one next to it would be best. She studied the corner of the box. Nabisco made these. Nabisco knows I love my husband. Nabisco knows my grandmother loves me and it is not a trick. A little bit of magic here and there. Before you know it you done walked all the way to heaven. My my my, child.

She dropped the box of cookies into the cart. She said, “Is that a trick, pretendin you can read my mind when I’m with my husband?”

“There be tricks and there be truth. Himself opens your head up and just stands there reading all your pages. D double dare me, Miss Laverne.”

She found that they did have vanilla creams and thought at first that it might be best to get some because the next time could be too late. But her cookies were not on the list. What else was there on the list? The Devil wet his thumb and turned an imaginary page in an imaginary book. “Page 138,” he said. She picked up the creams and set them down beside the wafers.

“If you so wonderful,” she said, “why you let my grandmother’s brother die in that place?”

“Himself lets no one die. Himself doesn’t have the power of life and death. You die cause you wanna die. You live cause you wanna live.” The Devil closed the imaginary book.

Himself is a big fat liar.” She tried to recall the name of her great-uncle, a man dead in upstate New York before she was even born, tried thinking back to those Sunday visits with women relatives when all that yak-yak about the Devil had just washed over her and out the nearest window. It wasn’t talk about boys or new clothes after all, so why give a real listen? I kissed a boss boy named Freddy…Oh, willya, oh, willya, be my steady? And a young woman whose name was known by fine men on both sides of the Anacostia River, a woman who would dance all night for the asking, that woman could take care of herself. Laverne came to the end of the sweets aisle and turned onto the one with coffee and tea. What was that dead man’s name? Uncle, uncle, tell me your name.

The Devil had slowed behind her and she hoped that he was afraid she would remember her great-uncle’s name and fling it at him the way people in the movies threw holy water on vampires. The name would poof him into nothing. She stood before the coffee. Was Maxwell House, her husband’s favorite, on the list? It was coffee good to the last drop, and to convince a shopper, the blue can had a final drop of coffee right at the lip of an empty cup tipped on its side. The Devil said in her ear, “How could himself let him die when himself ain’t never laid eyes on that boy?” There was a coffee she had been meaning to try, the one the television woman sang was a heavenly coffee, “a better coffee money couldn’t buy.”

“My grandmother,” Laverne said, “wouldn’t lie to me.” This was the grandmother with the house on the Gold Coast, the one fearful to live without fire, the one who had turned away from meat. The brother, eight years old, had wasted away in that upstate New York farmhouse as he and his older sister had waited for their parents to return from a trip to Albany, a trip begun before one flake of snow had fallen. It had been snowing for fourteen days straight when the Devil as an old woman, trailing that long yellow shawl, had come up over the mountains of snow with the ease of a woman strolling on the beach. Laverne, on all those Sundays, had listened to what the women had to say about the dying boy, how gnawing on a table leg had not been enough to save him until the sixteenth day when his parents returned, arms full of food. “She wouldn’t lie to me.”

“Then,” the Devil said, “you best tell your sweet lil grandmother to get the story straight and stop puttin the lie to himself. Himself wouldn’t lie on her, so she shouldn’t lie on himself.” He sauntered away two feet or so and turned to face her. He put on his hat.

The Devil was telling the truth, and she knew this, though just an hour ago it would not have mattered one way or another. She pushed the cart past the Devil. No coffee. No tea. No me. “Don’t hurry now,” the Devil said. “There’s a big money-off offer comin your way.”

She came to the personal items. She remembered the few things on the list, cookies for her boy, shaving cream for her husband. The can of Burma Shave was before her eyes. She opened the top, hoping the smell would remind her enough of her husband. There was nothing and she pushed the button and released a dab of the cream onto the top of her finger. There he was, webbed feet and all. Why hadn’t she remembered the uncle’s name? Was it less of a sin because she had never known him? Laverne put the cream closer to her nose and inhaled as deeply as she could. Was it less of a sin? The grandmother had gone out to hunt for more dead leaves, more roots, even though she had found nothing for three days. Her brother lay in the living room, already nearer death than he was to life.

Laverne rubbed the cream between her fingers and smeared it across the top of her lip, continuing to inhale as much as she could. And over the mountains of snow the old woman had come, greeting her grandmother. “Well, fancy meetin you out here,” the Devil said to her. “Fancy fancy fancy.” The snow was so thick that even two feet apart each was sometimes obscured from the other. “We hungry,” the grandmother said. And from somewhere within her shawl the old woman had pulled out a fried chicken leg, golden and plump, still giving off warmth as she unwrapped it from the wax paper. Laverne put two cans of shaving cream into the cart. “Lemme take it back and share it with my brother,” her grandmother said. “Please, ma’am.” The Devil did not say no to this. The Devil said, “Oh, there’s more, honey. There’s plenty more where that come from. You just eat this here. Go on now. There’s plenty more.” And the grandmother ate as the snow peppered and salted the chicken. The old woman disappeared back over the mountains of snow, and as the snow covered and absorbed the chicken bones, the grandmother waited, first in the snow and then in the house. The boy died way late in the night, well after the chicken had become a part of her body.

Laverne came to the last aisle, the one with the fresh meat. She turned the corner just in time to see the old woman from the beauty parlor lean over the section of the meat case with the hamburger. The woman picked up a package and as she moved to put it in her cart, a man bumped into her. “You piece of shit,” the old woman said to the man, “why don’tcha watch where you puttin down them clodhoppers of yours?”

“Ain’t no call to be like that, lady,” the man said. “I’m sorry. It was just an accident.” The Devil was again beside Laverne. His hands were clasped behind his back and he watched the man and the old woman.

“Ain’t that much fuckin accident in the whole goddamn world, you piece of shit!”

“Grandma, please,” the little girl said as she took the meat from the old woman and placed it in the cart. “Please, Grandma, les just go.”

“I’m sorry,” the man said. “I’m really sorry.”

“You’re a fuckin animal, you hear me?” the old woman said. “You and that mule-fuckin mother a yours!” The little girl began to cry but the Devil did not look at her.

“Leave them alone,” Laverne said to the Devil.

“I have no power,” the Devil said. “Ask em.”

“If they’d shot that goddamn mule fore your mama got to it, I wouldn’t have this goddamn problem right now.”

“Please, Grandma, les go.”

The girl grabbed her grandmother by the waist, pressing her face and her new hair into the woman’s side. The old woman pushed her away.

“She’s just a child,” Laverne said.

The Devil said, “A child, a chick, a big fat dick. What’s it to you, Miss Laverne? What’s it to me?”

Laverne went to the girl and knelt and pulled her close. Laverne told the girl that it would be all right and in a few moments the girl stopped shivering and crying. The girl continued to cling to her and Laverne told her she would never leave her.

“They should lock you up for this,” the man said to the old woman, who called him more names as he walked away.

Laverne stood and looked at the old woman. The woman blinked and bowed her head, staring into the cart, then she looked at the girl, who drifted to her side. “The nerve of some people,” she said, still not looking at Laverne, each of her words getting softer and softer. “Come on, sweetie,” she said and placed one of the little girl’s hands on the edge of the cart and moved away.

Laverne turned around. The Devil’s suit and hat and tie and two-tone shoes were gone. He had on a baseball cap and green T-shirt and shorts and tennis shoes. “Tell your mother,” he said, “that I will see her next Friday, just after she’s eaten all that good Catholic fish.”

“Leave her be,” Laverne said. “She’s sickly, and gettin older.”

“Sick and old,” he said, “but not yet dead.” He straightened the cap with the Washington Senators logo. “You and I are not yet finished. There’s more to talk about, starting with what does your husband think of that boy not being his. Have you and him had that conversation, Laverne?” He tucked the T-shirt into the shorts. He raised his arms and twisted his torso from side to side, then he twisted his neck. “Oh, the men out there in the world who just love to follow in Joseph’s footsteps. Is your husband named Joseph, Laverne? Can I call you Mary, Laverne?” He leaned over and touched his toes three times. “You and I will talk later, but right now your grandmother is waiting for me with a nice glass of brandy in that mansion on the hill that cost an arm and a leg. And one soul.”

He stepped around her and was gone.

Laverne looked at her cart, at the few items in it. She made her way around the shoppers to the door of the Safeway. The uncle had had a name but the more she tried to think of it, the more it fluttered out of reach. Uncle Somebody, please tell me your name. Outside, the sun was even higher and Good Hope Road was even more crowded. She looked to the left, toward the 11th Street Bridge. Why had all the men in her family escaped days like this? Why had the key to heaven been left with the women? Down where Good Hope met the bridge would be a good place for him to jump into the Anacostia River and swim over to the rest of Washington. She went to the right. There had never been a Saturday when she had thought that her son and her husband were not waiting for her on up the road. Now, something told her with utter finality that they were not there, that the boy was not standing and holding his father’s hand, his little heart beating just to see her again. Something kept telling her she was alone. Laverne waded into the crowd, and the current of the colored people was so strong that it simply carried her on up the road.