The Negro lady with the snappy oval bag didn’t give us a glance as she
click-clack
ed on by. That was fine with me, although I’d tell Big Ma otherwise if she asked, just to keep her from worrying. And I’d make it short and simple. I only get caught if I try to spin too much straw.
With both feet safely on the ground, Vonetta became her old self, her face shiny and searching. “What do we call her?”
I’d gone over this with Vonetta and Fern many, many times. I told them long before Papa said we were going to meet her. I told them while we packed our suitcases. “Her name is Cecile. That’s what you call her. When people ask who she is, you say, ‘She is our mother.’”
Mother is a statement of fact. Cecile Johnson gave birth to us. We came out of Cecile Johnson. In the animal kingdom that makes her our mother. Every mammal on the planet has a mother, dead or alive. Ran off or stayed put. Cecile Johnson—mammal birth giver, alive, an abandoner—is our mother. A statement of fact.
Even in the song we sing when we miss having a mother—and not her but a mother, period—we sing about a mother. “Mother’s gotta go now, la-la-la-la-la…” Never Mommy, Mom, Mama, or Ma.
Mommy gets up to give you a glass of water in the middle of the night. Mom invites your friends inside when it’s raining. Mama burns your ears with the hot comb to make your hair look pretty for class picture day. Ma is sore and worn out from wringing your wet clothes and hanging them to dry; Ma needs peace and quiet at the end of the day.
We don’t have one of those. We have a statement of fact.
Vonetta, Fern, and I stood next to the young redheaded stewardess assigned to watch us until Cecile came forward. The stewardess reread the slip of paper in her hand, then eyed the big clock mounted by the arrival-and-departure board, as if she had someplace else to be. She could have left me alone with my sisters. I certainly didn’t need her.
A man in navy overalls swept garbage off the floor a few feet away from us. He went about his job with no expres
sion, sweeping cigarette packs and gum wrappers into a dustpan that he emptied into a larger trash can. If I were him, picking up after people who carelessly dropped stuff on the ground, I’d be nothing but angry.
They call it littering when you carelessly drop things. They call the careless folks who drop things by a cute name: litterbug.
There’s nothing cute about dropping things carelessly. Dropping garbage and having puppies shouldn’t be called the same thing. “Litter.” I had a mind to write to Miss Webster about that. Puppies don’t deserve to be called a litter like they had been dropped carelessly like garbage. And people who litter shouldn’t be given a cute name for what they do. And at least the mother of a litter sticks around and nurses her pups no matter how sharp their teeth are. Merriam Webster was falling down on the job. How could she have gotten this wrong?
Vonetta asked me again. Not because she was anxious to meet Cecile. Vonetta asked again so she could have her routine rehearsed in her head—her curtsy, smile, and greeting—leaving Fern and me to stand around like dumb dodos. She was practicing her role as the cute, bouncy pup in the litter and asked yet again, “Delphine, what do we call her?”
A large white woman came and stood before us, clapping her hands like we were on display at the Bronx Zoo. “Oh, my. What adorable dolls you are. My, my.” She warbled
like an opera singer. Her face was moon full and jelly soft, the cheeks and jaw framed by white whiskers.
We said nothing.
“And so well behaved.”
Vonetta perked up to out-pretty and out-behave us.
I did as Big Ma had told me in our many talks on how to act around white people. I said, “Thank you,” but I didn’t add the “ma’am,” for the whole “Thank you, ma’am.” I’d never heard anyone else say it in Brooklyn. Only in old movies on TV. And when we drove down to Alabama. People say “Yes, ma’am,” and “No, ma’am” in Alabama all the time. That old word was perfectly fine for Big Ma. It just wasn’t perfectly fine for me.
The lady opened her pocketbook, took out a red leather change purse, and scooted coins around, searching for the right amount for adorable, well-behaved colored dolls. Big Ma would have thought that was grand, but Papa wouldn’t have liked it one cent. Now it was time to do what Papa had told me: see after my sisters.
“We’re not allowed to take money from strangers.” I said this polite enough to suit Big Ma but strong enough to suit Papa.
The redheaded stewardess was appalled by my uppity behavior. “Don’t you know when someone is being nice to you?”
I put on my dumb dodo face to fake not knowing what she meant.
What was the sense of making the stewardess stand guard over us if she refused to protect us from strangers? She thought it was all right to have the large white woman gawk at us, talk to us, and buy our attention. We might as well have stood by ourselves.
I didn’t have to shift my eyes to see mile-long pouts on Vonetta and Fern. I didn’t care. We weren’t taking nothing from no strangers.
The lady was all smiles and squeals. Her face shook with laughter. “Oh, and so cute.” She put all the nickels in Fern’s hand and pinched her cheek faster than I could do anything about it and was gone, as big as she was.
Vonetta grabbed Fern’s hand, forced it open, and took her nickel, leaving our two coins in Fern’s palm. No use telling them to hand the money over. They were already dreaming of penny candy. I let them keep their nickels and mine.
The stewardess reexamined the slip of paper. She shifted from one leg to the other. Both my sisters and me, and her high heels, were bothering her.
I looked around the crowd of people pacing and waiting. Papa didn’t keep any pictures of Cecile, but I had a sense of her. Fuzzy flashes of her always came and went. But I knew she was big, as in tall, and Hershey colored like me. I knew I at least had that right.
Then something made me look over to my left at a figure
standing by the cigarette machine. She moved, then moved back, maybe deciding whether to come to us or not. I told the stewardess before the figure could slip out of the airport, “That’s her.”
Fern and Vonetta were excited and scared. They squeezed my hands tight. I could see any thoughts Vonetta had about reciting poetry, tap-dancing, and curtsying vanished. She squeezed my hand harder than Fern did.
The stewardess marched us on over to this figure. Once we were there, face-to-face, the stewardess stopped in her tracks and made herself a barrier between the strange woman and us. The same stewardess who let the large white woman gawk at us and press money into Fern’s hand wasn’t so quick to hand us over to the woman I said was our mother. I wanted to be mad, but I couldn’t say I blamed her entirely. It could have been the way the woman was dressed. Big black shades. Scarf tied around her head. Over the scarf, a big hat tilted down, the kind Pa wore with a suit. A pair of man’s pants.
Fern clung to me. Cecile looked more like a secret agent than a mother. But I knew she was Cecile. I knew she was our mother.
“Are you…”—the stewardess unfurled the crumpled slip of paper—“Cecile Johnson?” She paused heavily between the first and last names. “Are you these colored girls’ momma?”
Cecile looked at us, then at the stewardess. “I’m Cecile
Johnson. These”—she motioned to us—“are mine.”
That was all the stewardess needed to hear. She dropped the slip of paper on the floor, handed us over, and fled away on her wobbly high heels.
Cecile didn’t bother to grab any of our bags. She said, “Come on,” took two wide steps, and we came. The gap between Cecile and us spread wider and wider. Vonetta sped up but was annoyed that she had to. Fern could only go so fast with her bag in one hand and Miss Patty Cake in the other. And I wasn’t going anywhere without Vonetta or Fern, so I slowed down.
Cecile finally turned as she got to the glass doors and looked to see where we were. When we caught up, she said, “Y’all have to move if you’re going to be with me.”
“Fern needs help,” I told her. Then Fern said, “I do not,” and Vonetta said, “I need help.”
Cecile’s face had no expression. She swooped down, grabbed Fern’s bag handle, and said, “Y’all keep up.” She started walking, the same wide steps as before.
I took Fern’s hand and we all followed. The gap wasn’t as wide as when we’d first started out, but there was distance between Cecile and my sisters and me. Mobs easily threaded through and around us. You couldn’t see we were together.
There was something uncommon about Cecile. Eyes glommed onto her. Tall, dark brown woman in man’s pants whose face was half hidden by a scarf, hat, and big
dark shades. She was like a colored movie star. Tall, mysterious, and on the run. Mata Hari in the airport. Except there weren’t any cameras or spies following the colored, broad-shouldered Mata Hari. Only three girls trailing her from a slight distance.
We followed her outside, where green and white cabs lined up. Instead of going to the first cab in the line, Cecile ducked her head and searched every other cab. It was at the fourth cab that she bent down and rapped against the window. The driver, wearing a black beret, leaned over, nodded, unlocked the front door, and said something like “Zilla,” which I guessed was short for Cecile in a colored, Oakland way.
Cecile opened the back door. “Come on.”
I asked, “Can we put our bags in the—”
“Girl, will you get in this car?”
Vonetta and Fern stiffened. Big Ma could be hard. Papa didn’t play around. But no one talked to me like that. It was just as Big Ma had said. We were in a boiling pot of trouble cooking. Still, there was no time to soothe my pride. I had to make everything all right for Vonetta and Fern so they’d fall in line. I got in first with my bag, pulling Fern in with me while she held on to Miss Patty Cake, and then Vonetta got in with her bag.
Cecile and the cab driver lit up cigarettes as we drove on. At least Papa doesn’t smoke his Viceroys in the Wildcat. Vonetta coughed, and Fern looked green. I didn’t bother
to ask what I could and could not do. I cranked down my window to let the air in.
We were quiet. Riding along. Gazing out the windows at Oakland and stealing looks at Cecile. Before I could get a thought going about Cecile or Oakland, the cab driver let us out not too far from the airport.
“You live near the airport?” Vonetta asked.
Cecile didn’t answer. She just said, “Come on.”
As we walked, she hid deeper into her hat and shades, like she didn’t want anyone to see her with us.
Was she ashamed she had three girls she’d left behind and had to explain?
Who are these girls? Yours? Why don’t they live with you?
Don’t expect no pity from us. We were asked the same questions in Brooklyn.
Where’s your mother? Why don’t she live with you? Is it true she died?
Cecile placed Fern’s suitcase on the bench of a bus stop and sat down.
“Why are we taking the bus?” Vonetta asked. “Why didn’t the cab take us?”
I shushed Vonetta just to keep Cecile from saying something mean.
By my Timex, the bus came in four minutes. Cecile made us get on first and said, “Go all the way to the back and sit down.” When we found seats, Cecile was still with the bus driver, arguing with him. “Ten and under ride for free,” she said. “Now give me four transfers.”
I had been eleven for a good while, standing tall; but I said to Vonetta and Fern, “If anyone asks, I’m ten.”
Vonetta folded her arms. “Well, I’m still nine. I am not going back to eight.”
Fern said, “I’m staying seven.”
I hushed them both down. A lotta good it did if the bus driver heard us getting our ages straight. Tell the truth, it was Cecile I worried about, not the driver. We didn’t have to stay with the bus driver for the next twenty-eight days. We had to stay with Cecile.
Big Ma said Cecile lived on the street. The park bench was her bed. She lived in a hole in the wall.
You can’t say stuff like that to a kid asking about her mother when it’s snowing outside or pouring down raining. You can’t say, “Your mother lives on the street, in a hole in the wall, sleeping on park benches next to winos.”
I didn’t understand expressions when I was six. That they were strings of words spoken so often, the string fell slack. “Your mother lives on the street, in a hole in the wall, sleeping on park benches next to winos” sounded exactly as Big Ma said it. When you’re six, you picture your mother living on black and gray tar full of potholes, broken glass, skid marks, and blackened gum, all of that
overrun by cars, buses, and trucks. You squeeze your brain one way, your imagination the other way, and see your mother peeking out the holes of crumbling abandoned buildings to stay dry when it snowed or rained. You see your mother sleeping on splintery park benches stained with pigeon poop and a smelly, toothless wino sleeping next to her. When you’re six, you wonder why your mother would rather live on the street, in a hole in the wall, and sleep on park benches next to winos than live with you.
Even though I’d finally figured out these were expressions and not the plain, factual truth, I expected Cecile Johnson to, at the very least, be bad off. To be one of those “Negroes living in poverty,” as the news often put it. I expected I’d have to nudge Vonetta and Fern into knowing better when they asked for all the things we had at home, like Mr. Bubble bubble bath, extra helpings of chicken and ham, or banana pudding on Sundays.
When Cecile slowed her man-sized steps, tore off her big hat, her scarf, and her dark glasses, we knew we had arrived. We followed her into the yard and down the walkway. I stared at her eight thick braids of unpressed hair, pencils shoved in the plait above her ear. Then I joined my sisters, taking in the shock of her house and yard. The place where she lived.
“This your house?” Vonetta was the first to put our amazement into words.
To begin with, the house was covered in peaks of
hard green frosting. Stucco, Cecile called it. She said she applied the stucco herself. The green prickly house was surrounded by a dried-out but neatly trimmed lawn. To one side of the house was a rectangular concrete slab with a roof over it. A carport, she said. Just no car. On the other side, a baby palm tree sloped toward the sun. That palm tree was as out of place as the stucco. That’s how I could be sure it was Cecile’s home, all right.
Even though Cecile said the house was hers and not to worry about how she got it, that wasn’t enough to suit Vonetta.
“Big Ma said—”
I kicked her before she could go further. She knew better than to repeat Big Ma’s words; and if she didn’t, that kick should have smarted her into knowing better.
Whether Cecile heard Vonetta starting to insult her or if she saw me kick her second child, she didn’t let on. She just said, “Come on,” and put the key in the door.
We walked inside and looked around. I expected to see writing on the walls. Wavy, colored hippie writing all over, since she was free to do what she wanted in her own house. I expected to read strings and strings of words tapped out from her pencil onto the walls. But the walls in Cecile’s house were clean, painted a yellow beige, and had no writing. Still, flashes of memory popped before me. Flashes of Cecile writing on the walls, and on boxes…Flashes of paint smells…Papa painting over her pencil marks…
Flashes of loud…Papa and Cecile. Angry talking. When I’d asked about it, Uncle Darnell had said they’d fought over Cecile writing on the walls all the time.
“Your room’s in the back. Bathroom across the hall. The daybed rolls out. That should be enough for all y’all.”
Fern folded her arms, holding Miss Patty Cake by a tuft of her patchy, yellow hair. “We need night-beds. We sleep at night.”
I could tell Cecile didn’t know whether to be annoyed or amused. She looked at all of us wondering not only who we were, but
what
we were.
Fern didn’t notice the scrutiny. She turned to me. “I don’t nap in the daytime. I’m in the second grade.”
Never to be outdone, Vonetta said, “I’m in the fourth grade.”
Cecile said, “I didn’t ask for all that.”
As I expected, Vonetta’s feelings got hurt because she was always sticking herself onstage for everyone to see her. Still, Vonetta hadn’t been kicked enough. She whirled around in the living room like a dance-recital fairy. Whirled around on her heels—taking in the clean walls, the curtains, a beat-up sofa, a few stacks of books, and not much else—landed, and said, “Where’s the TV and everything?”
Vonetta was too far from me to nudge or kick.
Cecile dropped Fern’s bag on the floor and started muttering, “I didn’t send for you. Didn’t want you in the first place. Should have gone to Mexico to get rid of
you when I had the chance.”
It didn’t seem like she was talking to us. She didn’t even look at Vonetta. Or Fern and me. She kept talking, muttering about Mexico, throwing her Mata Hari disguise on the beat-up sofa.
Our mother wore pencils in her hair, dressed like a secret agent, had a stickly, prickly house, a palm tree when no one else had one, and clean, painted walls instead of the writing I remembered. Now I got why our mother ran away. Our mother was crazy.
“Come on,” I said. “Let’s see the room. Put our stuff away.”
Vonetta and Fern raced down the hall, pushing to be first. Cecile yelled after them, but they were too excited to hear her.
I came in after them. A bed with a brass headboard and arm rails, a blue cover. A dresser. A goosenecked floor lamp with a glass bowl in the shape of a half-moon. It was more furniture than she had in the living room.
“We can’t all fit on this one bed,” Vonetta said.
I raised up the blue cover and found the other bed underneath.
“Come on. Help me pull it out.”
We all latched on and pulled. The bed rolled out into a stair step of one bed below and another above.
I said, “She should have helped us.”
“Surely should have,” Fern said.
“I sleep on top,” Vonetta called.
“No, I sleep on top.”
Fern did her best Rocky the Flying Squirrel leap, arms outstretched to belly onto the bed. Vonetta followed, and they wrapped into wrestling. I let them. They hadn’t had a good fight all day. After six and a half hours on the plane and keeping up with Cecile, I figured they could use the recreation.
They took turns getting the best of each other. But just before crying time set in, I pulled one off the other and said, “You both sleep on top. There’s enough room.”
“Why do you get a bed all to yourself?” Vonetta cried. “You’re not that big that you need a bed all to yourself.”
I was big enough to give up a full view of the world on the 727 and big enough to outsmart my sisters at every turn.
“You can come down here with me,” I said, scooting over so I wasn’t claiming the whole bed. “I don’t care.”
“I’m staying on top,” Vonetta said.
“Me too.”
We looked around in silence at the walls, the dresser. The goosenecked floor lamp with its half-moon glass bowl. It certainly wasn’t much.
Vonetta wanted to say something. She had that look.
“Spit it out, Vonetta,” I said.
“Yeah, spit it,” Fern said.
Vonetta cut her eyes toward Fern. To me, she said, “Del
phine. What we got to do with Mexico?”
That one had also thrown me when Cecile said it:
Should have gone to Mexico to get rid of you when I had the chance.
I didn’t rightfully know what that meant, but I was all my sisters had, so I said, “That’s where women go who don’t want their babies.”
“But why Mexico?”
“And not Queens?” Fern asked.
“Because Queens is too close,” I said as if I knew. Then I added, showing all of my age and wisdom, “They buy babies down in Mexico for rich people.”
They both said, “Oh.”
I didn’t want to say Big Ma was right. Cecile was no kind of mother. Cecile didn’t want us. Cecile was crazy. I didn’t have to.