“Yeah, but you know how to say
trampling all over it like ignorant elephants
in French.”
Kenya laughed a little, and then felt awkward in the silence that followed. She stood abruptly from the big chair she’d been sitting in, the one that the kids had argued over the night before, cramming in and jostling each other. “I don’t want to disturb your quiet time,” she said.
“I think the quiet is something you can share,” said Cindalou.
Kenya lowered herself back into the chair and opened up an early Alice Walker novel she’d plucked off a shelf in a room the kids called the Free Library. That was as opposed to Johnbrown’s library, where borrowing a book involved actual paperwork and solemn vows about returning the book in such-and-such condition.
Cindalou glanced over. “Whew. That one makes
The Color Purple
look like that French children’s book you were reading.” Kenya didn’t tell Cindalou that when the title character, a little boy, died at the end of the children’s book, Mademoiselle had wept about it. Cindalou went on. “I’m tellin’ you, early Alice is
rough
. I mean, if you think about the ending,
Color Purple
was obviously her idea of a fairy tale.”
Cindalou and Kenya turned pages, drifting in and out of conversation about
The Third Life of Grange Copeland
. (“Let Hollywood try to turn
that
into a movie,” Cindalou muttered.) But just when Kenya relaxed, feeling that silence between them was okay, she heard Cindalou say, “Your mother turned me on to Alice.”
Kenya was trapped.
“I’m pretty sure you don’t want to hear this,” Cindalou continued. “But I miss her. I been missing her this whole time.”
“Uh-huh,” said Kenya. And then, to her horror, Cindalou was wiping away tears. “You know, not in a sexual way of course, but I think I was just as much in love with her as I was with him. But everything got so…”
They heard footfalls on the stair and then the shuffle of the Chinese slippers Sharon wore around the house.
“My goodness, what’s wrong?” she asked.
“We’re just catching up,” Cindalou sniffed.
Sharon placed a hand on her chest and looked sympathetic. “You all must have
so much
to talk about. Don’t let me, you know, stanch your flow.” Then she fidgeted in the doorway to the kitchen, looking uncomfortable. “So,” she said, “would you like me to start dinner?”
“Yeah, Sharon. I want you to start dinner,” Cindalou said in a hard voice.
“It’s just ’cause the kids—”
“You think I don’t know what time the kids eat?”
“Come on, Cinda, don’t be angry. I didn’t
mean
anything.”
“You never do, Sharon.” Cindalou got up and stormed past Sharon into the kitchen. She slammed cabinet doors and pots, muttering loud enough to hear:
no-cookin’ ass if I want her to start dinner can’t nobody eat that mess …
Sharon smiled at Kenya and rolled her eyes. Then she poked her head into the kitchen. “Rarf!” she said. “Rarf! Rarf!” She whimpered, holding limp paws in front of herself. She glanced back out at Kenya, who remained pinned to the chair, smiling weakly.
The back door to the kitchen opened and the sounds of the children and their father filled the downstairs.
“In the doghouse again, huh?” he said. Nannie, delighted with her mother, commanded her to sit.
* * *
“I have a suggestion,” Johnbrown announced on a Sunday at the beginning of Kenya’s second week at the farm. He had decided that Kenya would shadow each member of the household for a week (even Nannie and Dennie, so they wouldn’t feel left out) to see what they did all day and how she might fit in that summer.
“Me first!” said Cindalou. “It
would
be nice not to have to hire that smelly German lady to help with the canning.”
“I thought maybe we’d let Kenya choose first.”
“Okay,” said Cindalou. “But last year ’Mandla said she saw that woman pick her nose.”
“Mama,
you
saw that.”
“Well, somebody saw it.”
Kenya imagined being a captive audience for Cindalou, Sharon, or her father. “Well, I don’t want, um, nose picking in the jam,” she said. “But I thought I’d spend some time with the kids.”
“Yay!” yelled Dennie. “Ken-ya! Ken-ya! Ken-ya!”
She had meant Amandla, but it was too late now.
By Monday night, Kenya was exhausted. Despite the elaborate chart in the den, it wasn’t clear to Kenya what Nannie and Dennie usually did all day, because their time with her seemed to revolve around getting her to do things with them that the other adults either wouldn’t do or wouldn’t do for long. Instead of doing the exercises they’d been assigned, they demanded that she read them every storybook in the house and then tell stories of her invention. They wanted to play dress-up in the attic clothes, dry-rotting castoffs that would probably never make it to the nearest Salvation Army—180 miles away—and they wanted her to dress up, too. Dennie demanded that she play an idiosyncratic version of backgammon for kindergartners that “my baba” had taught him. Chess was Nannie’s game; “my baba” had taught her that, too. Both of the twins were intolerable, weeping losers and horrible winners, and they were never more distraught than when they suspected that Kenya was letting them beat her.
On Tuesday afternoon, which was blistering, they wanted Kenya to walk them a sweaty fifteen minutes down to the creek, where they were allowed to play only with adult supervision. Kenya, whose main experience in the wilderness had been on a Barrett trip to the Pocono Mountains where the cabins had microwaves, immediately despised the creek’s muddy water, which was lush with thick, slimy weeds.
“Do you all think the creek is, um, sanitary for the kids?” she asked the adults that night after the kids had gone to bed. She had showered hours ago but still felt itchy.
Johnbrown laughed. He said, “We can cut their ‘week’ short, you know. I’m not sure they’ll know the difference.”
“Please, Baba, you’re their teacher. Nannie definitely knows how many days are in a week,” Kenya said. “And it’s only Tuesday. I’ll survive.”
At the beginning of the week, they listened to her. In addition to the matter of obeying Sharon, Cindalou, and Johnbrown, who reminded them every day to respect their big sister, they had made pleasing Kenya a competition. But as the week progressed they began to challenge her. By Thursday, Kenya was beginning to feel hysterical; they were back at the creek, where the kids demanded to go every afternoon. The weeds caressed her legs, and the same horsefly kept landing on her arm. About a foot away, Nannie listlessly whipped her body back and forth, making herself a human sprinkler.
“That’s it, guys,” Kenya said. “It’s time to go back and get washed up for dinner.”
“Can we stay a little longer?” said Nannie.
No matter when Kenya announced that it was time to stop one thing and move on to the next, Nannie always tried to bargain for more time. Kenya had learned to start preparing the kids to stop what they were doing before it was necessary, in order to accommodate Nannie. But now she thought she would scream if one more insect buzzed in her ear.
“I think now, Nannie.”
“But I’m not
ready
.”
Dennie didn’t care much for the creek. One of his earliest memories was of his mother holding him in a pool in New Jersey, and it was evidently the country of his soul. He usually raced Nannie into the water, splashed around, and then exited quickly. He would dry off carefully, clean the mud from between his toes, and sit down to imitate birdcalls.
“Maybe we should go,” he said.
Kenya said, “I really appreciate that, Dennie. We have to wash up for dinner. You know Cindalou doesn’t like us sitting down to eat with creek water on us.”
Nannie looked up at the sun, as Johnbrown had no doubt taught her. “It’s nowhere near dinnertime. And it’s
Mama
Cindalou.” She kept moving back and forth, whipping up water. “Why don’t you call her
Mama
Cindalou?”
“Because she’s not my mother,” Kenya said. Heat rose in her chest and throat and she folded her arms to tamp it down. Nannie folded her arms in imitation and crossed her eyes. Then she cackled.
“Let’s go, Dennie,” Kenya snapped, reaching for the boy’s hand. Then she turned away from Nannie and began walking toward the house.
“Nannie,” Dennie cried, twisting back toward his sister. “Come on!”
“Bye, y’all,” yelled Nannie. “I’m swimming to the other side!”
Kenya stopped short and weighed her options. The shallow creek floor dropped in the middle and Nannie couldn’t swim—not really. Dennie made a whimpering noise and she realized she was crushing his small hand. She dropped it when she heard loud splashing and turned to find Johnbrown striding into the water. He had appeared out of nowhere just in time to see Kenya abandon Nannie.
“Baba!” the girl cried happily.
He didn’t say anything. She kept saying his name and he kept ignoring her until she turned it into a sob,
Baba, Baba, Baba
, but Johnbrown remained silent, his face a bland mask. At dinner, he was in his usual calm and expansive mood. He did not reprimand Kenya or even address the incident. She never found out what he told Sharon or Cindalou. But he must have told somebody something, because the next morning she found herself being ushered out to the Paul Bunyan supermarket in town with Cindalou.
“We were thinking you must be tired of them wild beast kids,” Cindalou said with a laugh as they walked out to a maroon station wagon, one of three cars in the gravel lot. “Wear you down to the gristle, don’t they?” she said.
“It wasn’t that bad,” Kenya lied.
The car door closed and before Kenya could stop it, Cindalou started talking.
* * *
“I didn’t know nothin’ about nothin’ when I came up to Philly,” Cindalou began, as if she and Kenya were in the middle of an interview. The narrative continued for the rest of what was meant to have been the twins’ week, as they ran errands in Freedom’s semiabandoned shopping district, with its dilapidated bars, junk stores, ancient post office, and sour-looking white people in yesteryear’s fashions. It continued organically into a week of shadowing Cindalou as they sorted enormous piles of laundry, made chicken stock, and drove around in the car. Cindalou would pull on a thread of her narrative, drop it to pay a vaguely hostile cashier or issue a cooking directive, complain about the multitude of country stations on the car radio, and then pick it right back up.
In the drugstore, she said: “Your father was the smartest person I’d ever met, white or black. He wasn’t slick. I knew a lot who were slick, but he was smart. That really impressed me then.”
As they hulled the strawberries without the aid of the German woman, who had gone off to open a restaurant, she explained: “But I’m not trying to say that he tricked me into anything. I was a grown woman.
“I felt so bad, though,” she said as they walked back from the chicken coop. “Your mother had been so kind to me. I was used to girls hating me. All the girls in Greenwood called me a conceited yallow bitch and thought I was trying to steal their boyfriends. My only friend was this other light-skinned girl who actually
was
conceited and
did
steal this one girl’s boyfriend. But them boys wasn’t shit anyhow. I was just the closest thing to a white girl they could get their hands on without getting lynched …
“Me and your mom had the best talks,” she recalled as they sat at the kitchen table. They were supposed to begin preparing a stew for lunch, but all Cindalou had done was take out carrots. “It was like having a sister. Now you know, my real sister was eleven years older than me, but with your mom, it was like we’d grown up together.
“And the thing with your dad—I mean, we cared for each other deeply, but we were out of our minds. It would be funny now if things hadn’t gotten so crazy—a grown man spray-painting police stations while I was the lookout? I don’t know if you remember that terrible woman Marjorie, but I hooked up with her just to have someone to talk to about all of this. Anyway, when I found out I was pregnant, I thought hard about not having it, but that wouldn’t have been my first time doing that. The other time was down South in some dirty woman’s house and I nearly bled to death. And I had that stupid Marjorie talking in my ear about murdering babies … so I was just going to break it off with him and then move back home to have the baby. I wasn’t even going to tell him. But he guessed. And then…” Cindalou paused, making some calculation. “Then he told me he and your mom were on the verge of breaking up anyhow and it wasn’t because of me.”
Oh did he?
thought Kenya, wondering if that had been true.
“And then he told me about his idea. Now it seems totally crazy, like did I really think somebody as together as Sheila would go for it? But it was such a beautiful vision. We could all be together. We could raise our children together. They would be my family.
You
could be my family. I mean, I hope you feel like that now.”
Cindalou suddenly looked at Kenya, as if just remembering that she had been there all along. “Well, do you?” she said.
“What?” said Kenya, her eyes darting around the kitchen for some help. She saw that it was nearly noon. Everyone congregated at the table at half past twelve. The stew would have to be very quick.
“Feel like I’m your family?”
“Well, I guess Amandla’s my sister. I guess you’re sort of like my stepmother? Or one of them?”
Cindalou’s eyes went flat.
Since that had already happened, Kenya asked, “Where did Sharon come from?”
Cindalou sighed. “The Graterford Prison Visual Arts Initiative.”
“But…?”
“She’s mostly okay. She means well. Some of them do mean well, you know. That was even true in the South—maybe even more true down South. But it’s also true that if you’d have told me ten years ago that I…” She trailed off and rubbed at her temple, looking weary and innocent, like a very tired small child.
Kenya remembered the feeling she used to get from being near Cindalou, always wanting to laugh. Back then, she had seemed so excited that it made you excited to be around her. She remembered her attempts at Sheila’s hairdos. Now her hair was long and she wore it in a bun, like Charlena’s mother used to. But where Charlena’s mother’s bun had been immaculate, Cindalou’s was sloppy, and Kenya could swear that her hairline was receding.