Another evening (just after we’d moved and had returned to Houston for a visit), she was walking home from the store carrying two big bags of food. Fresh vegetables had moistened one of the bags; when she reached the yard, a neighbor dog, a little schnauzer, bounded over to her, startling her. She swung away from him and the bag ripped. She fell to her knees in the dead grass, sobbing — from exhaustion, I realize now. I approached her quietly from where I’d been playing. She didn’t ask me to help her. She tried to smile through her tears. “Hello, honey,” was all she said. I felt scared, seeing her vulnerable, unhappy. I picked up a cabbage, a carton of eggs (only two had cracked), a spaghetti package. “You’re a sweet girl,” she said. “That quality’s going to get you anything you want in life.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean you won’t have to live in a ratty old neighborhood like this when you grow up.”
“I like it here. More than Dallas,” I admitted.
“You’ll do better than this, believe me.” She tucked a banana bunch under her arm.
“Ariyeh and me — ”
“Ariyeh and I.”
“—we’re going to live in a tent with our husbands and children and be famous.”
“For what?”
“Just for having our pictures on magazines.”
She frowned at me, balanced a jam jar on her hip. “When’s the last time you saw someone who looked like Ariyeh on a magazine cover?”
“I don’t know.”
“That’s right. Remember that.”
I didn’t know what she meant, and I don’t know now where her self-hatred started, or how. The fall from the garden. Shame at her own naked self, leading to her long rest, too soon, under a headstone just like one of these.
And my own shame? Recalling the girl today who needed a tampon, I remember sitting in my Dallas bedroom, cramping, trying to read the Modess box while Aretha sang on the radio, “R-E-S-P-E-C-T.…” I longed for Ariyeh then. Was the same thing happening to her? This messy flow … it wasn’t just another fault of mine, was it, a flaw in the package, like my off-kilter skin?
I rise, brush leaves and dirt from my pants, and pick a sunflower for the supper table.
Bitter sucks a beer while I sauté onions and garlic in a crusted old pan, maybe the pan Mama used at this very same stove. Robins chortle in the trees, and I miss my parrots; dogs bark, children shout. The garlic quashes the old-bathrobe smell floating through the house. Bitter’s put jazz on the phonograph, slow, sad piano, something I don’t recognize. Sunset, filtered through bumps and flaws in the kitchen’s thick window, is a pink-purple patch on the dirty yellow wall.
“So. You give Ariyeh a heart attack, showing up out the blue?”
I smile, drain the vegetable oil, add soy sauce and a teaspoon of sesame oil to the pan. “She’s looking good. Tough job, though.”
“‘Bout all she can do with them kids is keep them off the streets a while — which they’re gonna end up there, anyways. Some of them pretty smart, I guess. But they ain’t going nowhere — less’n their mamas just up and move them out.”
I let that pass. “Still, you must be proud of her.”
“I am.” He picks at the label on his bottle. “That Northern mayor of yours. He put any money in the colored schools? You know, we hear y’all enlightened up North.”
“I hate to tell you, Uncle, but Dallas isn’t far from here. In spirit, as well as space.”
He laughs. “Tell you the truth, sad as it made me, I didn’t blame Helen for sneaking you out of here. Look what she done for you. You a educated girl. Self-possess. Good job. Nice car. Hell, she done the right thing. Shoulda takened Ariyeh with her.”
“Ariyeh’s done just fine.” I slice a catfish fillet into checkerboard squares, then lay the squares in the marinade. I boil water for frozen peas, start the rice.
Groaning, Uncle Bitter rises from his chair, walks to a scarred oak hutch. From a shelf he plucks an object, then comes and puts an arm around my shoulder. He shows me a red card, old, softened now almost to the texture of paper. Its corners have crumbled away. Faded, typed letters say, “Nigger — stay away from the polls.” “Nineteen forty-eight,” Bitter says. “Our second year here in Freedmen’s Town. One morning a prop plane come buzzing over our streets, dropping these cards by the thousands. Bloody snow. You best believe I didn’t vote that election. None of us did. We knew what it took to keep a roof over our heads, in peace. So Henry Wallace had to do without us.” He taps the card on his fingernails. “Things improve some over the years, little by little, but by the time you and Ariyeh born, we still didn’t have no library in this area, other than Buck Jackson, the barber’s, paperback collection, which he lent out to folks from the back of his shop. What I mean is, yeah. Ariyeh done well, all right. She a hard-working gal, smart as a whip. But it’s all been in spite of. You know what I’m say’n? What you got, when your mama move you north, Ariyeh got in spite of.”
“I know,” I say. I pour vegetable oil into a fresh pan, slide the fish in, and cook it over high heat. “But I lost something, too, Uncle Bitter. You and Ariyeh. After a certain point, yes, it was my choice — okay, I admit that — but by that time I’d been taught I was someone else, not the little girl who’d started to grow up here. It was hard to keep thinking independently. I didn’t know how to act around black people anymore — not that I ever learned how to act around whites. Can you grab us a couple of forks? We’re ready here.”
We settle at the table and I light a candle. “I lost whatever chance I might have had to find my daddy while I could.”
Bitter nods. He says, “This sure is nice, Seam. I ain’t et this fancy since Maevey died,” and we eat our meal quietly, awkward at first, then relaxed. He chews in a rapture. As we’re finishing up, I ask him about his childhood in the French Quarter. “Is that where you first learned to appreciate good food — and gris-gris?”
“Sure enough.” He swipes a napkin across his lips. “We lived in a little oyster-shell alley back of St. Ann Street, where the ol’ hoodoo queen Marie Laveau used to live. My mama said she ‘membered rich white folks pulling up in their carriages middle of the night, asking Marie for love potions.” He leans back and picks his teeth with a finger. “First job I ever had was hanging outside the produce warehouses down by the river, stealing spoilt ‘taters and onions. The shippers threw them away, see. I’d cut off the spoilt parts and sell them to restaurants for a nickel apiece or to the old ladies in the neighborhood, who always had ‘em some incense burning on an altar. I learnt a lotta spells making my rounds.” He laughs. “Back then, I thought the height of success was to be a street crier. I ‘member the watermelon man coming ‘round early in the morning, shouting,
“When I’s a little older, I graduated to selling coal off a wagon. We’d go to Storyville — all the red-light ladies slinking ‘round the doorways, freezing they asses, wearing them teddies, you know. Needed coal for they cribs, burn it down to ash. Lots of them practiced the hoodoo, too. And we’d sell to the gin joints. The Funky Butt Club, where Buddy Bolden played. And I ‘member hearing Satchmo for the first time when he’s just a pup — lots of good hot air. You know Satchmo?”
“Sure. Axeman’s Jazz?”