All Aunt Hagar's Children

SPANISH IN THE MORNING

In the days before I first started kindergarten, the men in my life came from here and there to bring me things and more things, as if, my mother was to say, I was going away and never coming back. In mid-August, my mother’s baby brother came down from his life in Philadelphia and went with the girlfriend of the moment, the one who would break his heart, to buy “some quality” at Garfinckel’s, a department store that had Negroes arrested if they tried to shop there. While the girlfriend could have passed for white among white people, black people knew their own kind. My uncle, in the darkest of his summer suits, walked two or so paces behind her up and down Garfinckel’s aisles, carrying two small boxes, wrapped and empty, a made-up chauffeur’s cap setting ever so straight on his chemist’s head. They were enveloped in youth and lived for games like that. My uncle giggled at one point, excited by it all, and his girlfriend, to halt her own giggling, turned and asked in a voice cultivated at Spelman College, “Is there something you want to share with us all, Rufus?” And she waved her arm as dramatically as she could, and all the white people near them turned to see one of their own take charge. My grandparents did not name him Rufus. My uncle bought me nine exquisite dresses and had me model each one for him and his girlfriend before they returned to Philadelphia.

The days took me closer to my first day of school, and the men in my life continued to come to me. My uncle Cyphax, who couldn’t seem to stay out of jail, came in the night when we were all asleep and left three pairs of shoes at our front door, and tucked in the box of each pair was a receipt from Hahn’s. “I have to fly,” he wrote in a note to me, “but I will see you before the end of the first lesson.” My grown cousin Sam and his family came with a bag of various items, including a ruler that changed colors depending upon the light falling on it and a composition book of about a hundred pages. On a few of the pages Sam had drawn some of the men in my life. “You can do school work on the rest,” he said and winked. At three months old, I had sat at his wedding on my mother’s lap in the second row of the drafty church on Minnesota Avenue.

Five days before I started school, my mother’s father, a widower of seven months, came and had three beers and had to stay the night on our couch. “I got a little beside myself yesterday,” he confessed to me the next morning before counting out and handing me five one-dollar bills. I held my hands out for the money and thought of the first memory of my life—my grandfather playing little piggy on my toes when I was four weeks old. At eight months old, I sat again on my mother’s lap at her mother’s funeral. And at one year and two months, I sat at another church when my grandfather married his second wife, who was to die in less than a year.

Finally, the night before school started, three hours before sunset, my father’s father came and tapped twice, as always, on our door. My parents had long ago offered him a key, as he lived less than a block away, but he always said he wanted a key to no man’s home but his own. My father’s father gave me a wooden pencil box he had paid a man fifty cents to carve my name into. And he gave me a red plastic transistor radio. My seven-year-old cousin, who had learned to read at three years old, would later dismiss the radio as junk because it was made in Japan. But I never cared. “Don’t take it to school, sugar,” my grandfather said that evening. “I already put the battries in, but you can’t take it to school.” I pulled out the silver antenna and looked up at him. Perhaps for months and months I had never taken the idea of school very seriously. The idea now stepped before me and for a moment seemed to blot just about everything out of my head, the whole summer, all the playing, my happy life. I was going to school. I turned the radio on. The music burst out and bounced about the room. The radio would work well for a very long time, but toward the end of its life, I had to practically stand on my head to get station WOOK to come in clearly.

I was the first of my parents’ three girls, inheriting from my mother her wide blossom of a nose and the notion that the universe could be lassoed and tamed. She came from a long line of Washingtonians who saw education as a right God had given their tribe the day after he gave Moses the Ten Commandments.

I inherited from my father the tendency to sleep on my side with one folded arm under my head and the other hand nestled between my thighs. I inherited from him the notion that the soil in D.C. was miraculous, that it would grow anything, even a rubber tree and oranges, which was what he managed to do. But the oranges were no bigger than cherries and they had hair and my mother would not let her girls touch them.

But this is about my father’s father. And me. And all of them.

My grandfather got as far as the second grade. “One and a half,” he would say and raise two fingers and bend one finger over. He spent most of my father’s first years as a shadow to his son. My father, at six, seven, eight years old, would turn a dusty corner in some road and happen upon a noisy crowd of men trudging to the fields in that place five miles outside of Columbia, South Carolina, men who laughed when my father asked if they had seen his father. My father would wake in the darkest part of the night and hear his father snoring somewhere in their cabin, only to find him gone in the morning. Sometimes, before morning hit, my father, hungry for the man, would rise and stand before the bed my grandfather shared with my grandmother, and she would wake and at first think her son was her father’s ghost. And there were nights, too, when my father would watch my grandfather in a piss and drunken sleep on the floor just inside the open front door, the last place he had fallen once he had crawled home. If my father touched him there in the doorway, my grandfather would groan, responding to the life in his dreams—perhaps a fist coming at him, or the candlelight reflecting off a third jar of moonshine, or the sliver of the thigh of a woman not his wife as she telegraphed something while crossing her legs.

In my father’s eighth year, my grandmother turned her back on all the life she had known and took my father and his two sisters to Washington, where, South Carolina old folks said, people threw away their dishes after every meal because it was cheaper to buy new ones. Three months after they left, my grandfather woke soaked in dew a few feet from train tracks, having spent the night with two quarts of a cloudy brew he had bought off a stranger who said he was from Tennessee “where good likker was born.” Before he woke, my grandfather had been dreaming that a child was sticking an especially long hatpin in his right leg as he weeded a section of his collard green patch in a cruel rain. Awake at the train tracks, he tried to move that right leg but found it twisted in an awful way, so twisted, as he later learned, that only the hands of God could untwist it. He laid his head back down. He could hear a train, but his mind could not tell him if the train was coming or going. My grandfather raised his head as best he could and managed to turn it to the right, to where the sun was coming from. He saw a boy no more than five years old eating crab apples. The boy raised his hand Hello. The sun told my grandfather it was not yet seven in the morning.

He knew that a drink would tell him five minutes this way or that exactly what time it was. The boy was steady watching him. He ate the apples whole, core and all. Not long before he told the boy to go get help, my grandfather asked him why he had not awakened him, and the boy told him he had been taught never to wake a sleeping man. With each syllable of the boy’s words, the pain in his leg grew.

When it came time for me, my parents’ first girl, to go out beyond their gate that kept the world at bay and begin school, they chose Holy Redeemer, a Catholic school that was down L Street where we lived, up 1st Street, and all the way down Pierce Street to the corner of New Jersey Avenue. My father had wanted me to go to Walker-Jones Elementary. The phrase “a stone’s throw” was made for how close Walker-Jones was to us—less than a hundred feet diagonally across the intersection of L and 1st Streets, close enough for him to stretch and stretch and stretch an arm across the traffic of the intersection into some classroom and tug at one of my plaits or tweak my nose when the teacher’s back was turned. Going there, in some ways, would have been almost like never going beyond the small world of my yard.

But my mother wanted her children to be educated by nuns and priests all dressed in black, the way it had been done down through the generations with her people. Taught by people who had a firm grasp of how big and awful the world could be. My father said she was way too impressed with the fact that the nuns had taught her Spanish, and my mother reminded him that the first things she had ever said to him had been in Spanish. Before noon, Spanish was just about all my mother ever spoke to my father and my sisters and me. There was no Miss La-De-Da to it, no putting on airs, just Spanish in the morning. No one in her life spoke Spanish, but she went on and on, conversing in Spanish for long periods with some imaginary person, or conjugating verbs, staying sharp for that day some woman from Mexico, lost and without a word of English, might knock on her door and ask for help.

That first day of school, my father took off from being a postman, and he and my mother walked me up to Holy Redeemer. Registration was a rather quick process, and before long they were bending down and telling me that they would see me in a little bit. Then they were gone, but I got the notion that they were just outside the school, standing on New Jersey Avenue or Pierce Street, waiting for me to finish or for me to tell them that I had had enough and wanted to go home.

I found myself in a kindergarten room with some eighteen other children and a teacher who was not a nun and whose eyebrows came together in a hypnotic “V.” We, including our teacher, were all colored. Not long after the door was closed, a boy at our little table of four began crying. The teacher could not comfort him, but she did manage to get him down to a whimper in that first hour. I felt strangely at peace sitting next to him, as if I had done no more than move from one room in my house to another. I, too, tried to comfort him, placing my hand on his shoulder. But he looked at me as if I were part of why he had to cry. In the end, he cried so much that a nun, a white woman encased in her habit, appeared and took him away. I did not see the boy again, but whenever I thought of him, I imagined him going on to a grand life at another school where they did wonderful things he did not have to cry about.

That first day my parents were waiting for me at noon. Back at home, my father’s father was with my two sisters and Sadie Cross, my mother’s best friend from across L Street. Sadie was married to One-Eye Jack, whose left eye had been shot out across the D.C.–Maryland line by a Prince George’s County policeman as Mr. Jack innocently changed a flat tire when I was six months old. Late that night he was shot, several of his friends gathered in my father’s kitchen, cursing white people. My father had me resting on his shoulder, and he kept telling me that it would be nice if I went to sleep like a good little baby was supposed to. Within two weeks of Mr. Jack being shot, the policeman’s Laurel lawyer and the Prince George’s County government people sent Mr. Jack separate letters designed to head off anything legal Mr. Jack might consider. The lawyer’s letter, with the law firm’s name embossed in gold letters across the first page, was two pages, double-spaced, and it related how Mr. Jack, kneeling on the ground as he fixed the tire in Mitchelville, had in fact threatened the policeman’s life. Mr. Jack had not only threatened the man’s life, the letter said, but the life of the policeman’s wife, at home asleep in her bed in Rockville. Had Mr. Jack killed the policeman, the letter said, life as the wife then knew it would cease to be. The policeman had no children but nevertheless Mr. Jack had endangered them and all the policeman’s generations to come for hundreds of years, because if the policeman had been murdered by Mr. Jack, none of those people would ever be born. Back at home, we celebrated my first day of school in the backyard with a feast my grandfather and Miss Sadie had prepared, including some fruits and vegetables my father had grown and which my mother allowed her girls to eat.

When the meal was done, my grandfather stood me before him as he sat and took my hands in his. “They treat you okay up there?” he asked. Anyplace he ever mentioned was always “up there.”

I nodded. He started to count the fingers on both my hands, five pigs on one hand, five pigs on the other. Before I left that morning he had had me knock three times on his wooden leg for good luck. “You still got all your toes, too, I guess,” he said now and smiled. “The nuns can sell a little girl’s fingers and toes for a lotta money up there at the K Street market.” He picked me up and sat me on his left leg, his good leg.

“Now my teacher,” he said, “was a mean old colored man who had the Devil in him.” I was still in one of the dresses my uncle from Philadelphia had bought me, though the dress was now covered with a towel tied around my neck. My youngest sister was asleep across my father’s lap, and my mother had put her middle child down inside for her nap. Miss Sadie was sitting next to my father. Her son was nine, a boy with thick eyeglasses who lived for books. He was a good son, named Jack after his father, and all the world praised him.

I told my grandfather about my new teacher.

“She’s no kin to that teacher of mine, I can tell you that,” my grandfather said. “Oh, how my teacher did have the Devil in him. And you know what? If you gave him a wrong answer, he’d take his pitchfork and bring it down on your desk, them that had a desk. Put holes in the thing and made it hard to write your lessons.” My grandfather’s right leg was made of the same wood used for coffins down in his part of South Carolina. “Itty-bitty holes in the desk. You’d be writin, ‘The grass is green,’ and just when you got to the green part, your pencil would sink down in one a them pitchfork holes.” My grandfather stretched out his wooden leg. We were mostly in the shade of the afternoon, but a bit of the sun covered his wooden foot in his well-shined shoe.

For the three weeks I was in Holy Redeemer’s kindergarten, my mother always picked me up at noon, as kindergarten was only half a day. She usually left my two younger sisters at home with Miss Sadie. Sadie’s son Jack went to Walker-Jones and would come to our house for his lunch. Sometimes, on the nicest days, my mother would put her youn gest, Eva, in the carriage and have her middle girl, Delores, walk alongside. Delores, at three, was picking up bits and pieces of Spanish from my mother and the two of them would gabber in what a stranger to Spanish would have thought was real conversation.

It was on a particularly fine day in late September that I waited in the playground for my mother, standing near the kindergarten door, mildly interested in the children from the upper grades running and ripping about. My own classmates and the teacher had all gone. My mother had never been late before, and because of the world my parents had made for me, I was not afraid.

About one o’clock, the nuns had each class line up. All the children were in uniform, the girls in blue jumpers and white blouses, the boys in blue pants and white shirts. The school was in the shape of an upside-down “L,” with my kindergarten door at one end and the door to all the other grades at the other. In moments, everyone had gone through the other door and I was alone in the playground.

I sat down on the bench under the kindergarten windows, still not at all worried. Somewhere in our world my mother was making her way to me, with or without her other two children. And as time moved on past one o’clock, as I edged toward concern, she was joined in my mind by my father and then by both my grandfathers and my mother’s people and all my father’s people, all of them coming to get me. So I hummed, and then I made up a song about that lady in Mexico who spoke Spanish in the morning the way my mother did. The lady in Mexico was standing in the road with her hand shading her eyes, watching her children skip toward her.

A little after one thirty a priest came from the other end of the playground, hurrying to the door to the rest of the school. Midway he happened to look toward me. He paused, no doubt surprised to see a child alone in the playground. Kindergarten children did not wear uniforms. The priest raised his hand Hello. I raised my hand Hello and after a moment the priest went on.

I was getting worried. I grew bored with singing and started to count the birds flying over. In one category, the pretty princesses’ category, I put the birds that I saw land in the trees, and in another category, the evil witches’ category, I put the birds that never landed. I could see my father and mother and the dozens and dozens of people in my life waiting at a traffic light, still on their way to me. The red light took too long and they looked both ways and did what I was warned never to do—they crossed against it. The birds stopped flying and I took to inspecting the hem of my dress.

It was more than twenty minutes before the priest came out the door and started back across the playground. He paused midway again, looking at me. He turned and went back through the door and soon returned with a nun. The nun motioned for me to come to them, and in the time it took for a bird to fly over, it was decided between them that I should wait for my tribe in that nun’s first-grade class.

The nun was white, and except for the wooden beads clucking at her side, she moved silently down the hall. I heard singing and talking children in the classrooms as we walked. I heard nothing from her class as we approached, and when we entered, all the faces turned to us. My unease was extreme because now I was so far from the spot upon which my mother had ordered me to stay put. But I said nothing. In four rows, front to back, the class had twenty-two or so students, and they were all colored. I alone had no uniform but was arrayed in a yellow Garfinckel’s dress. I was given the penultimate seat in one of the middle rows. Sister began the lesson where she had left off, and I, needing to be elsewhere, watched the clock in the front of the room because it was easier than looking at heads and a room and a nun I would not see again.

Before they left South Carolina for Washington when my father was eight years old, my grandmother kept reminding him and his sisters not to waste time. “Time’s a wastin,” she would say if they lingered in packing in the days before they left that Monday morning. It had been more than a week since they had last seen my grandfather. They heard rumors that he was about, around, but while my father would go in search of him, my grandmother set about discarding her old life as if her husband was not in the world. Her decision to leave South Carolina had come three weeks before they left, when my grandmother awoke alone in her bed and pulled back the covers and looked down at how still perfectly made up was the place where her husband should have been sleeping. Something in the very perfection of his place in the bed told her that she did not love my grandfather anymore. That particular morning my grandfather was asleep on some fallen magnolia leaves in a little forest not far from their cabin, where he had dropped in the night on his way home. The second my grandmother pulled back the bedcovers, her husband raised his head, as heavy as John Henry’s anvil, and for several moments he tossed off the aftermath of his drunkenness, because his world had shuddered and he had been disturbed in his sleep and did not know why.

“Time’s wastin. Time’s wastin.” She gave away what furniture she could not sell, gradually leaving the cabin empty of everything but my grandfather’s clothes, such as they were.

My father had no heart for any of it, for leaving their old piece of a home and his shadow of a father. He moped, he refused to put things in the heavy pasteboard suitcases my grandmother had collected. He said bad words and did not care if his mother heard him.

The evening before they left, my grandmother sat on the last chair they possessed, counting the money a man had given her for their chifforobe. For the seventh time that evening, my father shuffled by her, cursing under his breath. His mother grabbed his arm, startling him. “Ain’t I told you bout that?” she screamed. “Ain’t I?” His sisters came in from outside and stood watching.

“I ain’t goin no D.C.,” my father said. There was a good reason why my grandmother would sometimes see his face in the near darkness and think it her father’s ghost.

My grandmother took his shirt in both hands and lifted him up on his tiptoes, the way a strong man might do a lesser man.

“I’ll run away from that D.C. and come back down here to Daddy.” My father began to cry.

My grandmother considered his face, his body. “I’ll catch you,” she said at last, her face so close to his that he had no choice but to breathe the air she expelled. “No matter what, I’ll catch you.” She raised him up higher with one hand and slapped him. She waited while his whole body registered what she had done, then she slapped him twice more. “I’ll catch you and tie you to a bed till you a grown man. And every day I’ll beat you. Beat all the black off you, boy. Beat you every day of your no-count life.” She released my father, and he crumpled to the floor. My aunts had not moved from the doorway. My grandmother stood up. She took the money she had been counting off the table and put it in her bosom as she stepped over my father.

When I was two and a half years old, my father sat me on his lap and we spent part of an afternoon going through his Life magazines. In one there was an article on proletarian art in the Soviet Union. In my imagination my grandmother and my father and my aunts were to become like the statue in a picture in that article. There was a road that southern people took to get to Washington, and on that road there were the four of them. My grandmother had one hand pointing ahead. She wore a bonnet and a long pioneer-woman dress. My two aunts, each carrying a bundle, were looking to where she was pointing, and their hands were shading their eyes like that lady in Mexico waiting for her children. One of my father’s hands was in my grandmother’s hand, lest he run away, and his other hand was pointing back, a boy frozen in photograph-gray.

I was never to return to kindergarten. Gradually, as I waited for my mother that first day in Sister Mary Frances Moriarty’s first-grade class, I took my eyes from the clock because the slowness of the minute hand was beginning to hurt my heart. I looked about without moving my head. Sister was printing the letter “P” on the blackboard. Taking up her pointer from the tray at the board, she turned and pointed at the beginning of the line of letters. The students began to recite the alphabet.

At the letter “D,” I joined in. I had nothing better to do. My father had taught me the alphabet when I was two. On a blackboard of a million words, I could pick out my name. At the letter “H,” Sister Mary Frances looked at me, the third-week kindergarten student. At “J,” she told the class to hush. She aimed the pointer at me. “Only you,” she said, and pointed to the letter “A.” I recited the alphabet as she pointed. When she came to “P,” the last one she had printed, we stopped. There were cards of the whole alphabet along the top of the board, and I raised my hand up to the letter “Q,” which was a foot or so to the right of the clock. I pointed to each letter all the way to “Z.” I was tempted to do more, to point all about and name them out of order, the way my father had taught me. For my father, the letter “M,” for example, had no life if it only existed between “L” and “N.”

Sister returned the pointer to the tray. Whatever she was thinking, it was not on her face. She came down the aisle toward me, her hands behind her back, her beads gently swaying. The door opened, and I saw Miss Sadie with Mother Superior, the principal. Sister went to them. Miss Sadie’s eyes found me and she raised her hand Hello. I raised my hand Hello. The nuns were saying something to Miss Sadie but her eyes never left me. The wife of One-Eye Jack had no time for white people.

“They treat you right?” she asked as we walked home. She told me that after my sister Delores had fallen off the couch, and a big knot had appeared on her forehead, my mother had run up with her and Eva both in the carriage to Sibley Hospital on Pierce Street. Knots on the body terrified my mother, and she had momentarily forgotten about me waiting for her at school. “They treat you right?” Miss Sadie asked again after we had turned off 1st Street onto L.

Sister Mary Frances had seen something, and so kindergarten, she told my mother the next morning, would not be enough for me. First grade and even second grade might not even be enough. My mother was happy, but my father saw something he didn’t like in my skipping a grade only three weeks after I started school. “Watch out when white folks wanna do somethin for you, cause it ain’t gonna be pretty,” he said as they talked in bed after my sisters and I were asleep. My mother prevailed.

They gave me two weeks to get a uniform, and so good-bye to all my Philadelphia uncle’s beautiful dresses. I was given the same seat of that first afternoon. I learned that my seat had once belonged to a boy who was gone now. I had the seat in front of a boy named Lawrence Wilson. I was to the left of Sylvia Carstairs, who liked to look at me and flutter her eyelashes as if imparting some coded message. “You wanna be my best friend?” Sylvia whispered my third day in first grade. I had no great mission in life at that point, and so I nodded. “Friends for life, right?” she whispered and flashed the eyelashes. I had the seat to the right of Herman Franks, who quietly hummed all the day long. I was behind Regina Bristol, who had the darkest and the most perfect skin of anyone I had ever known. Angels in my dreams had such skin.

“You know what?” Sylvia said not long after we became friends for life. We were jumping rope with three other girls at recess, and Sylvia was standing beside me as I turned the rope, waiting for one girl to miss so Sylvia could get a go. She was whispering, the way she did in class. “Regina got a boyfriend.” I looked Sylvia full in the face as the news settled over me. My father liked to call himself my mother’s boyfriend, but a boy, not a man, as a boyfriend was quite new to me. “Am I still your boyfriend?” my father would ask my mother, putting his lips to her neck as she stood at the stove. Sylvia pointed to a boy who was playing tag. In class, that boy sat two seats up and to the left of me. He, like most of the children in class those first days, was only a uniform. Now, as Sylvia whispered, he started to exist whole and unto himself. He was skinnier than the son of One-Eye Jack and not half as handsome as Regina was beautiful. On a purple shelf in my imagination, Regina and her tag-playing boyfriend took their places and stood straight, holding hands, like two figures plucked from a wedding cake. “I think they gon get married one day,” Sylvia said. The girl jumping rope had been going for a little more than two minutes. “My boyfriend forever,” my mother would say at the stove and turn to kiss my father. I could see Regina across the way on the kindergarten bench, her legs crossed, her arms folded, talking to another girl. Then, as if to emphasize what Sylvia was saying about them, the boyfriend stopped playing tag and waved vigorously and desperately to Regina as if from far, far away. Finally, Regina raised her hand to him and lowered it quickly and went back to talking. “See,” Sylvia said. “They gon get married in a big church,” and she raised her arms to indicate the bigness of the church.

I chanted with the other girls as the jumping girl went on through the third minute:

I’m happy, you’re happy

At last, the jumping girl stumbled and Sylvia moved to take her place. The girl took the rope from me, and I waited my turn. Sylvia jumped high, higher than all of us. We had good sun that day. Regina uncrossed and then recrossed her legs, keeping her knees very much together, the way a woman of the world did without thinking. The girl she was talking to seemed to have something important to say, and that girl punctured the air with her forefinger to make certain Regina got her point.

I’m happy, you’re happy

Go tell Mama, go tell Pappy

We went on in the different suns down through September and up into the days of October. My father’s corn that fall was not what he would have liked, but the peaches from the small tree in the northeast corner of the backyard did well by him. My mother sliced up some and put cream on them and allowed me and Delores to eat them. She had enough left over to make a cobbler for my father’s father.

Aside from the days at school, my life was not different in ways I noticed. My sister Delores, though, had become emboldened while I was away and seemed to think that all the toys I possessed belonged to her. I would come home from school and most of my things would be in her toy box. The only weapon I had was to tell her that I was going to school and she was not. Saying this to her made her blink to the verge of tears, and she would go out of our room and I would be free to reclaim my things.

Three years after my grandmother and my father and my aunts arrived in Washington, my grandmother—in the year she bought her first tourist home to house black travelers not allowed in white hotels—married a man who had never taken a drink in his life. He had three filling stations, one in Northeast and two in Northwest, and he had a big house in Anacostia that stood strong against the wind. With all his soul, this man wanted my father to see him as his father and to love him, but my father would have none of that. Then my father, at seventeen, began to change. He had witnessed the man bathing and feeding and caring for my grandmother that year she took a horrible sick; it was too late, for the man, Grandpa Peter, having suffered year after year in my father’s awful light, had tried to save himself by closing his heart to my father.

My father’s father had found his way to Washington in an April when my grandmother was still yet a newlywed. My grandfather arrived with his new wooden leg; his whole being was wobbly those first days in Washington, for he had not had a drink in five months. He sent word to let his children know where he was, and he made a life shining shoes. My father, eleven years old, walked the miles to the hotel lobby where my grandfather worked, but my aunts did not go to their father for a long time, and when they did, Grandpa Peter, their stepfather, drove them.

That second Monday in October the hands on the clock had just settled into being eleven o’clock when Mother Superior, the principal, opened the door and looked at Sister Mary Frances. Sister pointed at Regina Bristol and then to the boy the whole class knew as her boyfriend. The boy rose first, then Regina rose, slowly. She put the two pieces of paper on her desk together and slid them up to the corner opposite the well where the ink bottle would have gone, though Sister had not told her to do that. The four of them, the nuns and the children, left, with Sister closing the door behind them and looking sternly at us before she did. We heard them go through the nearby door that led to the stairs going up. They must have stopped in the stairwell because we did not hear them ascending. After a long, long bit of time we heard a slap, then silence. There was another slap, and there quickly followed a wail from Regina. They all returned shortly, the boy quiet and Regina crying, and Sister took up where we were before Mother Superior had opened the door.

I said nothing about it to my parents, but a fear took hold of me through out all the school days, even though Sister Mary Frances continued to look at me with eyes that said In-You-I-Am-Well-Pleased. Regina and the boy were still together on that purple shelf in my imagination, but they were sitting now, hands casually in their laps, sitting as if they were getting tired of waiting. At home in my bed I dreamed of school. I went there in my dreams, but the door was always locked.

That Thursday following the Monday after the slaps, minutes after our snack, I stood to answer a question, an answer that would earn me a gold star. I sat down, and as I listened to others answer, I looked at the backs of Regina and the boy who would not be her boyfriend ever again, their heads turning left or right depending upon which of our fellow pupils was speaking. I thought how easy it would have been for him to turn and make a face at her, the way he used to do. I studied the back of Regina’s head, the way the dark perfect skin of her neck flowed down from her yellow-ribboned hair, down, down beneath her collar. It was such a vulnerable neck. Then, though Sister had not spoken to me, I rose as if a question had been put to me. I looked around as I stood and held tight to my desk, for my head had begun to swirl. I began to sit down again, but stopped, not knowing which way to go, back down or back up. I looked at Regina’s neck and felt a great flood overwhelm me.

It was, I learned later about myself, as if my heart, on the path that was my life, had come to a puddle in the road and had faltered, hesitated, trying to decide whether to walk over the puddle or around it, or even to go back.

I woke in my bed that Thursday, and it was dark outside. Dr. Jackson, one of my mother’s cousins, had come over from Myrtle Street. He was sitting on the side of the bed, holding my hand and looking down at me as if I, now that I was awake, could tell him the why of it all.

“How you feelin, sweet of my heart?” he said. He was married to a woman taller than he was and they lived with their five children in a gingerbread brown house.

“Fine,” I said. He helped me sit up. I was wearing my pajamas. My father, in his postman’s uniform, was standing behind Dr. Jackson. He was holding my sister Eva. My mother was at the foot of the bed. My sister Delores was also at the foot of the bed, and I could just barely see the top of her head and her eyes. Seeing them all, I thought, “My room can’t hold all these people. It will bust.”

Dr. Jackson placed my hand at my side. His tools were beside him on the bed. He took up the stethoscope, and after he had listened to my heart, he put all his tools in his bag on the table next to my bed. He stood and commanded me to sleep. As they all left the room, I heard him say that he could find nothing wrong, but I may have dreamed those words later that night, just as I dreamed that I had knocked at the school door:

I stepped away from the locked school door and went alone back down to L Street, but rather than go home, I knocked at our next-door neighbors’. Mr. and Mrs. Lewis lived there. He had been in the merchant marines all his life and had saved a lot of money for his retirement so he could take Mrs. Lewis around the world as many times as she wanted. But not long after he left the sea for good, he had a massive stroke and now lived his days in a wheelchair that his son and my father could not get to stop squeaking. In my dream Mr. Lewis came to the door, talking and standing on his two legs the way I remembered when I was just an infant, no more than two months old. He took me into the backyard that he had given over to my father so my father could have more space to grow things. Mr. Lewis served me a fruit salad with the hundreds of fruits my father had grown. We were joined by my father’s father and Grandpa Peter and my Philadelphia uncle, One-Eye Jack, and a hundred others. My uncle Cyphax was there, once more out of jail, and he kept winking and raising his finger to his lips for me not to tell his secret. It became crowded in the yard, and I couldn’t see all the rest of the men in my life. I kept telling Mr. Lewis that I had to knock on the school door again. “Wait,” he said. “Just wait. Wait till the bell rings.”

I woke very late that Thursday night, and after adjusting my eyes to the darkness, I saw my father in a rocking chair across from the bed. He was arguing with someone in his sleep.

When I awoke the next morning I saw my father still in the chair. But when I sat up and cleared the sleep from my eyes, I saw that it was not my father but my father’s father. He was staring at me as if that was all he had to do in his life. I had never once seen my grandfather above our first floor. I had not thought that his wooden leg would allow him to climb the stairs.

“They didn’t treat you so good up there, huh?” he said. He was wearing a suit and a tie and his hat was propped on his wooden knee.

I shook my head No. I wasn’t yet able to do words because I still could not believe he had managed the stairs.

“Well, never you mind,” he said. “Maybe you don’t have all the luck you need.” He leaned forward in the rocking chair. “Here—” He pointed to his wooden leg before lifting his hat. “Get you some good luck.” I leaned over and tapped three times on the wooden knee. “Better get three more just to make sure.” I tapped again. “There be boogeymen everywhere.”

He leaned back. “Now your mama and your daddy say you don’t never have to go back to that school. You can go just cross the street,” and he thumbed over his shoulder in the direction of Walker-Jones Elementary some one hundred feet away. “Go just cross that street and be safe and happy as you would be in that front yard.” And just like that, the idea of going there seized me. Miss Sadie’s son went there, most of my friends in our neighborhood went there. It was only a few steps away, while Holy Redeemer was way out in the world.

My grandfather got to his feet. “Your mama gon come with some food directly.” I nodded. “I best get on. Don’t wanna suck up all your air. But I’m gonna come back to you tomorrow.” After he was full on his feet, he looked a moment at me and ran his hand around the brim of his hat and then placed it atop his head.

The next morning I came out of sleep to a thump on one of the bottom stairs. My father cleaned those steps until they shined like crystal. There was another thump. I sat up and began to realize what the sound was. I waited and wiggled my toes under the covers. “This little piggy wants some corn. This little piggy says, ‘Where you gon get it from?’ This little piggy says, ‘Outa Massa’s barn…’” When I was done with that foot, I started on the other. There came a thump. “This little pig says, ‘Run go tell!’” I came to the end on that foot and raised my left hand to my forehead. A Band-Aid covered the wound I suffered when I fell at my desk. There was another thump. I thought about the scab that would form and wondered if I would have a scar as big as the one on a boy I knew who had gotten hit in the forehead with a sharp rock. Children called him Rock Head because he had managed to live. Would people now call me Miss Rock Head, or would they have to come up with another name? There was a thump. “This little pig says, ‘Twee, twee, twee, I’ll tell old Massa, tell old Massa!’” Finally, all the thumps stopped, but my grandfather did not appear. I learned much later that he stood in the hall in those moments after the climb, straightening his tie and wiping the sweat from his face, preparing to come in.

Sister Mary Frances rearranged our seating, and I found myself in the last aisle, next to a window. In the curious alphabet of our lives, I sat behind Herman Franks. He continued on with his quiet humming. He would smell a mimeographed page, and he would hum. He hummed to scratch his head. He hummed to hear the song of a bird drifting into the room. The boy, the boyfriend, was gone when I returned, and I never saw him again. The curious alphabet of our lives still placed Sylvia Carstairs, my best friend for life, beside me. “Welcome back,” Sister Mary Frances said to me that first morning. “Welcome back.” I had not yet been taught what to say in such situations, and so I said nothing. In the curious alphabet of our lives, Regina Bristol was one seat down from the front of the class, still in one of the middle aisles. Sometimes, in those days of being back, I would lose myself and watch the orange leaves and the red leaves and the gold leaves snowing down along Pierce Street. By then, by late October, my wound was healing as best it could, and our class was down to nine boys.