“A long way,” the little girl said and yawned again. She closed her eyes and leaned back against her mother.
“Kinda. It depends,” the man said.
“What’s in the bag?” Marcus said to the man.
Avis’s eyes popped open and she sat up straight. “What’s in the bag?” she said.
“None of your business,” Marvella said to both children. “And turn around in that seat, Marcus.” The boy looked at the man as if for help from his mother’s order. Marvin was writing a letter to his father. The movement of the subway took his words sloppily above and below the lines, but he did not seem to care.
“My lunch,” the dreadlock man said. He opened the bag and took out an apple and held it before the girl. “What’s that?” he asked her.
“A apple,” Marcus said. “Anybody know that.”
“He ast me,” Avis said. “Mama, tell Marcus to stop.”
“Thas all you got for lunch?” Marcus said. “Boy, you pretty cheap.”
The man put the apple back. “No, I have a sandwich and a slice of cheese.”
“I hate cheese,” Avis said. “It taste nasty.”
“Well, I love cheese,” Marcus said. “I could eat it all day long.”
They saw him again on Friday and he was wearing a tie without a coat, carrying the same type of lunch bag. Marvella carried the same slip of paper, but the man with the dreadlocks did nothing but banter with Marcus and Avis.
On Saturday morning, on the pretense that they would go exploring before their father picked the children up, she borrowed her nephew’s car and went driving about the neighborhood. She had grown up in Southeast, but she had spent much of her married life in Northwest, where she and the children had lived before they moved that summer to Southeast to share a large house with her sister and her two children. By keeping the boys at Thompson School in Northwest two blocks from her mother, she worried less when the school day ended.
Turning on the car’s engine, she realized how she must look — on a beautiful day, she was dragging her kids along to look for a man she did not know, whom she could well come across strolling hand-in-hand with some other woman, who would probably also be arrayed in dreadlocks. She drove along an area bounded by 19th Street, Potomac, Kentucky, and North Carolina avenues, a very wide area that he would surely have to live in if he got on the subway at Stadium-Armory. In case the children asked what they were doing, she made up enough lies along the way for God to send her straight to hell, but surprisingly, there was nothing said, except for Marvin’s comment that being so far from home, they might miss their father when he arrived. But, as if to punish her, God did not produce the dreadlock man.
Over the next several weeks she saw the dreadlock man only four or five times, and on most mornings she simply took whatever train came first. The deeper they went into the year, the less she saw of him. But now and again, she would wake with one of the kids screaming for this or that, and she would take herself and them off to the subway determined to wait for him, for an orange line train. When she did see him, she was glad that Marcus and Avis engaged him in conversation and not once did she tell them to turn around or stop bothering the man.
“How do the lights know to turn off when the train’s gone?” Marvin asked her one Thursday morning not long before Memorial Day. His father had turned down the boy’s request to live with him and his girlfriend across the Maryland line in Capitol Heights. Marvella was surprised, and relieved, that Marvin had let the matter drop the same day his father said no.
Marvella had been distracted and she asked him to repeat the question.
“None a your business,” Avis said to Marvin.
“I wasn’t even talkin to you,” Marvin said to his sister. “You want a fat lip?”
“All right, stop it. Both of you, and I mean it!”
Marvin asked her again.
She tried to think of something that would satisfy him. “I guess the last car of the train hits a switch that tells the lights it’s gone and the lights turn themselves off.”
The lights blinked, and a blue line train came without them getting on. Marvin wanted to know why and Marvella told him to be quiet, for a few people were staring at them. Marvin quieted after they got on the next train, an orange line. The subway was packed and at their stop they had to fight their way to the exit. “Hey! Hey!” Marcus hollered. “Lettus outta this joint!”
As they went up the first set of escalators at McPherson Square, Marvin began asking again why they had to all the time wait when the blue train was like the orange. Just in front of the farecard machines, Marvella put down Avis and grabbed Marvin by the arm. She pulled him along to a corner, away from the passing people. Marcus and Avis followed silently.
“I’m the boss around here, and you seem to be forgetting that,” she said to him. He was utterly surprised and began to shake. “Who’s the boss around here, you or me? Who? Who? Who’s the mama in charge around here?”
His eyes filled with tears. “You are,” he said, but not loud enough for her.
She did not like scenes like this, particularly around white people, who believed that nothing good ever happened between black people and their children, but she could not stop herself. “Who’s the mama in charge around here, I said?” she kept asking the boy.
“You are,” he said louder, crying. “You the mama. You the mama. You the mama in charge.”
“Mama’s the one in charge. Mama’s the one in charge,” Marcus chanted as they made their way across Franklin Square Park.
“Marcus, shut up!” his mother said just as Avis was about to take up the chant.
After that, she did not ever again see the man with the dreadlocks and she did not look for him anymore. But for some time, as she went about her days with their blocks of time, she would find herself comparing his hair with other dreadlocks she saw. By then the subway people had extended the orange line all the way to Vienna.
THE SUNDAY FOLLOWING MOTHER’S DAY
When Madeleine Williams was four years old and her brother Sam was ten, their father killed their mother one night in early April. If their mother sent forth to her children a cry of help, or of good-bye, they did not hear it, at least not on any conscious level, and they slept clear through to morning. About six thirty that morning, their father, Samuel, called his sister Maddie to tell her what he had done, how he had done it. “I stabbed her a lot,” Samuel said, and though Maddie was still rising up from sleep as he talked, those words were forever imprinted on her mind. He told her to come get his babies, that soon they would be up and ready to eat. As far as anyone could ever tell, the two-minute-or-so conversation he had with Maddie was all he would ever say in life about the murder of a woman the whole world believed he loved — give or take this or that — more than anything. After that, the most Samuel would ever say to anyone about it, including his own attorney, was that he was the one.
“Mr. Carlson, it’s obvious you cannot structure a defense for a man who does not want to be defended,” the judge assigned to the case of the District of Columbia vs. Samuel Lamont Williams said at one point to the attorney assigned to defend Samuel. That was but one of the sentences in the transcript of the trial that Madeleine Williams would come to memorize.
When Maddie arrived at the apartment that morning, she found her brother sitting in near-darkness on the floor near the couch, the telephone resting like a black pet on his lap. Still not quite fully awake, Maddie had traveled the three blocks to the M Street apartment only partially aware of what she was doing. Samuel was dressed only in his underwear; there was no sign of trouble about him that she could see, and for a bit this gave her comfort, and this was what she told the courtroom one sweltering day in July.