Authors: Dorothy West
With Josephine handsomely laid to rest in a Negro cemetery, to Gram—standing whitely by, thinking God knows what heartbreaking thoughts—was left the bitter legacy of living colored, with no one now who was true white with whom she could identify herself, and herself not even able to make a mother’s wish that she had died instead of her daughter, for Corinne, who knew no other mother but Gram, no other loving, no other comforting, would have been more bereft than Gram was if Gram’s hand had been lifeless in her grasp.
And now Gram was ninety-eight, wanting a hand to cling to herself, wanting Shelby’s hand because it was being joined in marriage with a true white one, and that union, in the time of generations, would return to its origination, the colored blood drained out, degree by degree, until none was left, either known or remembered.
Gram picked up her cane and started that long, long walk to Shelby’s room, on her way back to living true white, her cane and her trembling old hand along the wall giving what little help they could.
L
iz came up the hall stairs, carrying Laurie. Fresh from bottle and bath, the baby was full of infant play, her body bouncing inside her blanket and her hands snatching like petty thieves at anything they could grasp—a button, a strand of hair, a patch of skin. Gurgles of good will spilled out of her busy mouth in little bubbles.
Liz was on her way to Shelby’s room, where she took Laurie every morning, tucking her into bed with her sister so that the warmth of her baby girl’s body would begin Shelby’s day. If anyone asked, Liz left Laurie with Shelby to give herself an hour or so of time to herself before Corinne awoke and took the house in hand, but it was in fact a calculated act of love on her part, a tender ruse to reinforce the blood tie
between her child and her sister, and infect them with the habit of each other. If anything—knock on wood—ever happened to Liz, she wanted Shelby to be Laurie’s second mother. Not so very long ago that was the way it had been with their dolls. When one of them was sick enough to spend the day in bed, which scared her into thinking about dying, the other always solemnly promised to be second mother to the other dolls, to love them as much as she loved her own, to raise them as one family.
Laurie was certainly more precious per pound than a doll. If Linc remarried, Shelby would have to be Laurie’s second mother, and that husband-hunting hot pants who bedded him could beat her own brats. And if Shelby’s white husband didn’t want a colored man’s child around, he wouldn’t have Shelby around long either. Her colored blood would choose between them. It better.
Liz left Laurie snuggled deep into the crook of Shelby’s arms and tiptoed away to take the quick shower that would have to stand in for the lazy loll in the tub that her body cried out for. Between the innocent demands of that child and her mother’s anxiety about every nuance of the wedding, she wondered if she’d live to see Labor Day. She did the baby’s wash, wishing she didn’t resent this messy part of being a mother, then sat down briefly for a cigarette and a quick gulp of coffee, the instant kind that instantly kills all desire for another cup.
It was not the breakfast she would have chosen, but at least the hot drink gave enough of a charge to wheel Laurie around the Oval an hour later, while the family ate their
beautiful bacon without a crying baby for company. At home she ignored Laurie’s cries unless they were howls of pain, but here everyone rushed to pick her up and pet her as soon as she let out a peep. Everyone but Gram, who didn’t rush because she couldn’t and wouldn’t even if she could.
Liz parked the baby carriage by the kitchen door and scooped Laurie up in her arms. It was still early. She crept into the kitchen and up the side stairs. Nearing the top, she heard Gram tentatively striking the floor with her cane, feeling her way as if testing the hall for traps. Her slippered feet shuffled unsteadily forward with grim purpose. What in God’s name was she doing out here alone at this hour, a woman who couldn’t remember the last time she awoke before eleven? Was she going to be difficult in this last week before the wedding, when months of careful planning hung in the balance?
“Oh, Gram …” Liz murmured reproachfully. “What are you doing out here? Why didn’t you ring if you wanted something? Just because everyone in this fool house has lost their mind with this wedding, nobody’s going to forget about you. For Mother’s sake, please stay put. Let me take you back to your room. I’ll go wherever you were going and do whatever you want done.”
“You can’t,” Gram said. “You’ve got that child.”
“Gram,” Liz said for the hundredth time that summer, “call her Laurie. You screw up your face every time you call her ‘that child.’ If it hurts you to be so mean to a baby, why bother?”
Gram thumped her cane. “Keep a civil tongue in your
head. You’re not so grown that I’ve forgotten how many times I’ve changed your diapers. What you call mean I call blind. My sight’s no younger than the rest of me—old eyes like mine have to screw up to see a dark child.”
“Gram, you say ‘dark’ as if it were a dirty word. You’re not that blind; you’ve just got a blind spot. Look at Laurie’s skin beside mine. Hers makes mine look washed out. Maybe past generations had color prejudice, but my generation has color appreciation.” Liz held the baby out to Gram, who shrank against the wall for support, for succor, as the tiny hand reached out to her.
“Touch her, Gram. You’ve never touched her. Something will happen when you do. It happened to me. I was never mad for a baby, I was just mad for Linc. I loathed the whole business of being a mother. I hated the heaviness that kept me from my husband. I hated my howls when Laurie was being born. I hated all that bloody mess for a girl, and having to do it all over again if Linc wanted a boy. Then they held Laurie down to me and I touched her. Just as you once touched my grandmother Josephine, and Mother, and Shelby, and me. That’s when the miracle happens. The first time you feel the flesh of your flesh. Laurie’s the flesh of your flesh to the fourth generation. Touch her, Gram. I promise a miracle.”
But now Gram really could not see the child. She was made dizzy by the words coming out of Liz, the intimacies, the indignities. Flattened against the wall, she seemed without substance, as thin and crackly as paper, as if she had borrowed time from that baby and must now release it. “It’s
not her fault that you married her father. Why did you raise up Lincoln? Why didn’t you let his darkness die with him? Josephine sowed and I reaped.”
Her head sank forward from the weight of her impotence. Her tears were as dry as the dust her sorrows had stirred. She looked so old, so stricken, that Liz’s spurt of hot anger shied away from its target and thrashed itself out in her stomach.
“Gram, stop it. Stop it. Stop it. You make me feel sick. No matter how white the rest of us are, we’re just as colored as Laurie. It’s your race that says so. Laurie’s no different from me, just darker. The rest of your life would be so much easier if you’d only stop picking the scab off the sore.”
Gram’s head began to shake as if it were coming loose from her rigid body. Her voice was full of crying in the wilderness of time outlived. “Don’t hammer at my head until it rolls at that child’s feet. Don’t choose this morning to destroy me. There’s death in the Oval. I woke to the smell of it. That smell never fools me. Maybe, maybe it’s me that’s marked, but it doesn’t have to be. It could as soon be that friend of your mother’s—you know the one—who never comes into this house without complaining about her heart.”
“Why would you wish the worst to Addie Bannister? She never came into this house without remembering to ask for you. She likes you. You’re the only one whose background she doesn’t pick apart. She’s almost a member of the family: don’t wish a wake on Mother along with Shelby’s wedding.”
“I wouldn’t put bad mouth on Addie Bannister,” Gram said shrilly. “I don’t believe in bad mouth. All I’m saying is,
death is here waiting for somebody. It’s your mother who says it’s Addie Bannister. It’s your mother who says she’s nothing but bones. It’s your mother who says if she tries to come down her heart won’t stand the excitement. And I will tell you this—if death is sparing me for some other hour, some other place, I want to go home to die. That’s all I’m saying. I want to die at home. If you and your child will step aside, I’ll go ask Shelby to take me.”
But Liz took a protective step forward, partly to shield Gram from the specter of her own senility, partly to save Shelby’s day from a depressing start. Gram would live forever; wasn’t she doing it? “Gram, you don’t want to go back to New York today. Shelby’s getting married tomorrow. Both of you should be here. You wait and go home with Mother. Summer’s almost over. Another two weeks and we’ll all be packing up. Let me take you back to your room and ring for your breakfast. You had a bad dream. That’s all that happened. A nice hot breakfast will help you forget it.” She shifted the baby and took Gram’s arm to turn her in the opposite direction.
Gram shook her arm free. Like a windup toy that has been wound up too often, she turned herself around with a painfully slow, jerky motion, her cane tapping angrily. With what breath she had she hissed fiercely, “Keep ahold of that child before you drop her and say ‘twas me who made you. I’m going back to Xanadu, and you can’t stop me.”
Her journey aborted, her toilsome walk having led to nowhere but Liz’s dark baby, Gram used her elbow to steady herself along the wall, so that her hand could hold her heart to keep the hope from running out of it.
S
helby awoke to the laughter of Lute’s little girls too, their golden sounds penetrating the edge of her sleep and stirring her consciousness from its dream and into the waiting morning. She flung the covers back, wanting to be free of even this slight encumbrance of sheet and summer blanket. Leaning forward, with her knees drawn up to let the covers slide down them, she was in a cocoon of herself, the scent of her body, the clean smell, the warm smell, striking her nostrils sharply before it dispersed itself amid the breeze-borne scents of the onrushing day.
Jezebel barked in rapid-fire frustration—her squirrel bark. Some squirrel was no doubt far out of reach in the maple tree outside Shelby’s window, teasing her, probably by flicking its tail. It was a tree that no fat dog could climb for
all her foolish clawing at the trunk, but claw she did, as if her industry would bend the bough and pop the succulent squirrel into her mouth like an apple ripe for eating.
The barking stopped. Shelby knew that Jezebel was sitting on her stern at the front of the tree, her back bolt-straight, her neck stretched tight, her eyes unblinking and alert, her tail swishing back and forth as she tested her patience with the squirrels, not having learned from daily experience that she would give up first, her rheumatism rebelling against the strain on their summer truce, and her common sense advising her that a bone near at hand in a friendly house was more inclined to her persuasion than a treetop squirrel of unknown taste and toughness.
Shelby had had a puppy once, not a family pet with papers but a puppy of her own of infinite and interesting extraction. She was six when she acquired him, coming upon him deep in the berry-thick woods, where she was never supposed to go alone. But she had awakened one morning before anyone else, unable to wait another day for some forgetful grownup to take her to see if the berries were ripe. She fetched along her sand pail in case they were, and solemnly promised herself to stay within a stone’s throw of the house.
The pedigreed family dog, looking at Shelby with one half-opened eye and listening with only half an ear, was not bestirred to action by her preparations. He knew what children did with sand pails. They made mud pies. He closed his eyes, folded his ears, and fell asleep, never dreaming that Shelby was going out to get lost, and never to live down the shame of letting her.
At the edge of the Coleses’ back property Shelby
searched around for a stone, rejecting one after another in her search for one that would leave her inexpert hand with more speed than a large one.
She made a wild throw and marked the spot with her eye, which had no more accuracy than her aim. When she reached the spot, surprised and delighted that she had thrown so far, the bushes just a little beyond seemed to beckon her with their abundance. But even these could not compare with the bigger, bluer berries only one, only two, only three steps ahead, which somehow steadily shrank in size as more and more richly burdened bushes impelled her in every direction.
When she thought to look back, her house was gone. Its disappearance did not frighten her. A house was too big to get lost. She would find it exactly where she had left it, and nobody would scold her when she showed them the fruits of her disobedience.
Coming to a halt at last, she carefully selected a berry, licked it for taste, and dropped it into her pail. And as she listened to the round plop of its plumpness, she heard a stirring in the ground cover of leaves, the stubborn oak leaves of last fall, not yet decayed, not yet without sound nor yet turned into timelessness.
Shelby stared around her and saw two eyes staring back, two wistful brown eyes belonging to a dog with his head between his paws in the ancient attitude of submission. In her astonishment, Shelby let her pail fall from her hand to lie forever with the strange debris of the woods left behind by man in his eternal haste to get somewhere other than where
he was. Slowly, and with hands outspread in the way she had been taught, Shelby approached the puppy, believing him hurt and unable to move, making soft little motherly sounds to comfort him.
Kneeling beside him, she saw he was not hurt but trapped, his lead caught fast in a tangle of briers. Seeing the lead, she surmised that he had jerked away from whatever hand had held it too loosely. He had probably seen or scented a rabbit, and followed its elusive trail to his own disaster.
Still murmuring gently, Shelby tried to dislodge the lead, but each time she pulled the puppy choked and whimpered, his neck already rubbed sore by his own frantic tugging. She knelt beside him again, her head against his, to reassure him that she was there to help not hurt him, as soon as she figured out how. In a second or so she did see how, and unfastened his collar.