And there Sandra was lying up there in that Mulberry Medical Center putting her very life on the line to deliver that yellow Negro’s baby. Um, um, um.

  Charles’s mother used to say, “Don’t nothing go over the devil’s shoulder that doesn’t come back and buckle under his belly.” And it’s true, because LaShawn’s family has not had any good luck since then.

  The way they have just ignored my LaShawndra’s existence all these eighteen years, I probably should have jumped on LaShawn’s mother back in that hospital waiting room.

  And I would have done it, too. Kicked LaShawn’s mother’s ass! About some mess with my only child? Shoot! In a minute!

  Of course, I know that sounds coarse of me, but it’s the truth.

  That’s how I felt sitting up there in the Mulberry Medical Center back in the spring of ’78. First, people started running down the halls. But no one said anything. I tried to tell myself it had nothing to do with my child, but I knew that the commotion was about Sandra. You know, a mother knows. Then a nurse came out of the delivery-room area, shaking her head and muttering, “I ain’t never seen anything like that before!” And I guess I just lost it for a while.

  The next couple of hours are still all a blur to me. The young nurse’s exclamation should not have unnerved me so, but even though I was surrounded by my family, I felt so alone. Charles had moved out for the first time and was looking for employment on a construction site up in Macon. I knew where he was, but I couldn’t get in touch with him. I called—twice—and you know I don’t ever go running after anyone…well, except for LaShawndra. I found out by mistake a while afterward that I couldn’t find Charles because he was caught up in a poker game. You know, that’s the kind of thing that finally broke us up, that gambling.

  I felt if he really cared about me and his own reputation, he would have given it up.

  I sure could have used him that night.

  I think that was one of the reasons I broke down there in the hospital when they wouldn’t tell me what was upsetting the nurses so. I didn’t have Charles there to support me.

  I found out later from the doctor that it really wasn’t anything life-threatening. It was just unusual.

  I never said anything, but LaShawndra was born with a caul over her face. Medical people will say that it’s only a piece of the amniotic sac that encloses the baby that wasn’t completely ruptured during birth. It doesn’t occur as much nowadays, because most obstetricians break the sac to facilitate the birth, but the old folks believe it’s a sign from God marking the child as special. I don’t know why I never said anything to LaShawndra about it or explored it any more with Sandra. Even without the baggage of the veil, LaShawndra was more than enough to handle on the physical plane without exploring the supernatural.

  I guess I was just grateful LaShawndra came here intact. I knew that Sandra had thrown herself down the staircase of our home on Oglethorpe trying to get rid of her baby before anybody knew she was pregnant. I heard the thumps in the night and thought it was Charles coming in from gambling a little tipsy. The next morning I saw the bruises on her arms and legs.

  As she sat at the breakfast table playing with her grits and eggs, I prayed over what I suspected. Then I got up from the table and went around, stood behind her, and massaged her shoulders. I knew she had to have been sore.

  When I spoke, my wisdom didn’t come from me. I knew it came directly from the Holy Spirit.

  “Don’t throw away what God has given you,” I told her. “It might be the greatest blessing you’ll ever receive. Our blessings don’t always look the way we expect them to.”

  Then I hugged her and sat back down.

  I never even thought once about getting rid of my child, even though Sandra’s birth complicated my life, too. However, I felt it was all for the good.

  It was the sixties, and even at the age of nineteen I felt myself something of an earth mother as it was. I would have had more children if I could have. A houseful of children would have been just fine with me and Charles. But after Charles and I married—Sandra was almost two by then—I wanted to wait and make sure he wasn’t marrying me merely because I was pregnant. It just never happened again.

  I thought about going to a fertility expert, but the one time I mentioned it, very casually, Charles got really quiet. So instead I put all my energy into raising Sandra. I took her everywhere with me. She was exposed to so much, and I wanted her to know all kinds of people and experiences: civil rights marches in south Georgia, Wattstax in California, classical concerts at Chastain Park in Atlanta.

  I guess that’s why I couldn’t understand how Sandra could let me keep LaShawndra so much when she was a child. There’s no way I would have ever let anybody, not even my own mother, take my child while I was able to care for her. Absolutely not!

  But as Sandra and LaShawndra tell me, things are different now.

  Because LaShawndra is nineteen this year, I’m keeping a close eye on her. Nineteen was a pivotal year for both me and my daughter, Sandra…you know. We both became pregnant in our nineteenth year. So I’m trying to watch LaShawndra. As Jesse Jackson used to say, “Let us break this cycle of pain.”

  I guess that’s why I worry a bit about my two girls and men. I don’t think LaShawndra has ever had a real date, where the boy comes to the door and rings the bell and steps inside for a few minutes while she finishes dressing. Not even for the prom.

  Since LaShawn, even though Sandra has had plenty of dates, she can’t seem to find any man that she values. And LaShawndra picks those who don’t value her.

  I know they are both missing out on something important. I have to tell you, there have been many times I’ve missed that “man stuff” in my life. How a man can turn a phrase, a phrase that might seem rough or inappropriate to someone who was not intimate with him. You know…

  Charles had a way of teasing me when I was in the bathtub, in the midst of my “toilette.” He would be in a hurry for me to get out and come to bed, so he’d yell through the door, “Okay, Lily, just get the dirt, baby. The funk’s okay with me.”

  And it would be funny. I’d sit in that deep old claw-footed bathtub with soapy water up to my chin and laugh. Charles had sprayed the outside of the tub a bright fire-engine red, ’cause he knew I once had a dream of bathing in a red tub. I would not be able to get out of that tub and into bed with Charles fast enough.

  Charles was funny like that. That’s where LaShawndra gets it.

  LaShawndra has a great sense of humor. When she stayed with me on Saturday nights, we’d sit up watching W. C. Fields on videos and eating popcorn and apple slices. She always got Fields, even when she was no more than nine or ten. Charles would join us on the sofa when he came in late—from gambling, but I didn’t know that for sure at the time. I thought he had just been out with some friends for a beer. We were the kind of couple that enjoyed our own private time as well as our together time. The three of us would sit there together until dawn and laugh until we cried. LaShawndra, bless her heart, cherished those times. She called them her only “family times.”

  As I drove around town that Saturday, I could hear Charles’s voice just as clearly saying, “Lily, sugar, what you doing scoutin’ ’round Mulberry in the middle of the night?”

  He said he always called me “sugar” ’cause I taste so sweet. And that’s how he’d say it, too. “’Cause you taste so sweet.”

  When we were in high school, Charles always signed my yearbook with the same words: “Lily is my Life.”

  Ummm. Yes, there are times when I do miss Charles. Then I remember the things he said—well, actually, things we said to each other—in the last big fight we had. I’ve never been one who liked to fight. Screaming and hollering and crying in the bathroom and waking up the next morning with your eyes all swollen underneath with bags big as steamer trunks. I hate all that.

  LaShawndra says I don’t like all that “drama,” and I guess she’s right.

  Charles was like most men: He would avoid a fight or confrontation with his woman at any cost. And Charles was an easygoing man anyway.

  But just before he left for the last time, eight years ago last month, we had a dilly of a fight. One of those fights that starts in the bedroom, moves down to the kitchen, and then continues out the front door, down the steps, and out to the garage and driveway, where you find yourself standing in the street in your bathrobe, your fist raised in the air and you hollering at the exhaust pipe of your man’s car as he screeches away. And ends with him shouting out the window that you’re too damn hard and strict.

  That’s the kind of fight we had.

  That was when we ended it for good.

  It all started when he got arrested for gambling. Actually, the warrant read GAMBLING AND RACKETEERING. I can still see it as if it were still lying there on the slim silver tray on top of the television where Charles tossed it. I stood there in my work clothes: my dark business suit with a bright—probably red, I look good with red up close to my face—scarf around my neck. It was cold outside. I remember dropping my heavy black coat to the floor right there at my feet as I read again and again, with just my lips moving, GAMBLING AND RACKETEERING.

  I looked down the long panorama of Charles’s life, with all the exemplary things he did, and I thought, Um, all of that to come to this.

  I felt I could not let him take me down with him. I had to set an example for my girls.

  Charles had to go. For all the good it did my girls to have a male figure in the household, he had to go. Despite all the years we’d spent together, he had to go. Despite all the rough times we’d weathered together, he still had to go. He had to go.

  The first time we broke up, I just had Sandra to think of. But the last time, I had Sandra and LaShawndra to think of.

  I could not be responsible for my girls’ having a bad home life.

  Charles used to tell me that I didn’t know anything about a bad home life when I complained about his gambling or when I tried to criticize Sandra, his baby girl, and her parenting skills. Now, Sandra’s a true “daddy’s girl.” She was the “baby daddy baby” for sure!!

  Charles would say, “You shoulda been brought up in a home with a real crazy daddy and somebody was always screaming, ‘Lord ham mercy! He got a knife! He gon’ kill us all!’ Now, that’s a ‘bad’ household, Lily.”

  Well, one thing I did like about Charles—he was a straight shooter.

  So was Miss Moses. After we had sat at the emergency entrance to the hospital in silence for a couple of minutes, I started up the Explorer and circled the block twice.

  “Just can’t make yourself go in there, can you?” she said as we rounded the last corner.

  She was right. I couldn’t. As often as I had visited sick family and friends—the last time I saw my mother alive was in a bed at the medical center—taking flowers and magazines and fruit baskets with me on a regular basis, this time the terrible memory of LaShawndra’s birth, even if it was nineteen-year-old memory, just would not let me move through those doors.

  “You must be a mind-reader, Miss Moses,” I said, trying to lighten the gloomy atmosphere in the car.

  “You easy to read, sugar,” she said.

  I had to smile.

  “Why don’t you use a telephone, then, and call inside to ask what you want to know?” Miss Moses suggested.

  It was a good idea. Miss Moses was being a true godsend to me. I had my cell phone in my purse. So that’s what I did.

  The little girl on the hospital switchboard knew me from high school, and she gave me everything I needed to know.

  No one fitting LaShawndra’s description had been admitted in the last twenty-four hours. And let me tell you, hearing that news at two forty-five in the morning, I felt better.

  5.

  In fact, I was beginning to feel so peaceful with that old lady riding shotgun with me in the car smelling like lavender that I was content for a while to just drive up one street of Mulberry and down another looking for one little big-eyed girl. If I had not been so worried about LaShawndra, I think I would have actually enjoyed the ride.

  Miss Moses started humming a little tune under her breath, and it sounded so moving and old, like something from my childhood. Miss Moses sounded so content I knew she was enjoying the ride, too.

  I used to have an old aunt in the country who would jump in the car with anyone who was going into town, whether she had any business there or not. She would say, “I’m just ’long for the ride.” Looking over at Miss Moses as I toured Mulberry in the dark made me think of Aunt Mattie. That lovely old lady made me remember others, too.

  On Elm Street I saw my best little girlfriend, Mary, playing hopscotch on the wide sidewalk in front of the shotgun house of her childhood, her thick, nappy pigtails tied in red plaid ribbon at each end hopping with each move. On one street over from Oglethorpe, I envisioned my great-aunt walking to town for her Saturday shopping, shaded from the summer sun by a big flowered purple-and-red umbrella. On the corner of Poplar and Vine, I smiled at the memory of Charles, covered in the dust of Sheetrock, sitting on a crate of nails waiting for me to pick him up at the end of his workday.

  By the time Miss Moses and I had covered most of the west side of Mulberry, I still had not seen hide nor hair of LaShawndra. But I felt like I had been sitting next to my own sweet mother, who has been dead more than ten years. I was as content as Miss Moses seemed to be to sit there and drive in silence.

  After about half an hour she reached down and rustled around in one of the paper bags she had brought on board.

  I remember thinking, Now, where did she get one of those old shopping bags? The department store itself had been moved from downtown out to the Mulberry Mall and changed names and conglomerate owners thirty years before. But the bag, glossy chocolate brown paper with the store’s name—Davison’s—written in large white letters on it, looked crisp and new. Her scratching around in the bag raised the herbal scent of lavender all up in the car. I heard her take a deep cleansing breath. And I took one, too.

  The interior of the Explorer was beginning to smell like the inside of this white convertible VW Beetle I had back in the sixties right after Sandra was born.

  The car cost less than two thousand dollars new then. And it was less than a year old when I got it for fifty-four dollars. A man I knew in south Georgia took up with this white girl who had a nice van, so he gave the Beetle to me for fifty-four dollars and a half bag of some kick-ass smoke.

  And no matter what kind of perfume I wore, the interior of that car always smelled like herbal incense—lavender.

  The scent of lavender must have been what enhanced my short-term memory, too, because I suddenly recalled that I had been headed for the high school in East Mulberry when we came up on the motorcycle accident. So I turned at the next corner over from the McDonald’s and headed back across the Spring Street bridge.

  “Humph,” Miss Moses said.

  “Excuse me, Miss Moses, did you say something?” I asked. I was eager for the conversation.

  “I used to be a high school teacher,” she said.

  “Is that right?” I asked, even though I knew that Miss Moses had taught in the Mulberry school system as well as having taught adults in her home at night after she had retired.

  “I taught English and art appreciation,” she said as she rummaged through another of her bags. “I got a book in one of these bags here entitled How I Did It that was a teacher’s guide I used back in the 1920s. I come from teaching folk,” she explained.

  I understood that. Because I come from teaching folk, too. Not formal teachers, but teachers all the same.

  My mama used to say that her grandfather was the only man on the old plantation in a settlement along the river outside of Mulberry who had a knowledge of reading and writing. At the end of a day he would come home from the fields and find a whole pack of folks waiting on his front porch to have him read their bills and correspondence and write letters to relatives for them.

  The bells of Mount Calvary Church of God on Spring Street were chiming the half hour—half past three—as we drove by.

  “Those are the bells of Mount Calvary, aren’t they?” Miss Moses asked as we drove by the African-American church. But she asked it as if she already knew the answer.

  “Yes,” I answered, just as the church chimes began two bars of “Oh, Blessed Savior, Count on Me.”

  “Is that your church?” she asked.

  “No,” I told her, “my church is Emmanuel Baptist. But I don’t see myself as just a Baptist. I simply call myself a believer in Jesus.

  “As a matter of fact, my daughter, Sandra, is dating the pastor of Mount Calvary.”

  As soon as I had said it, I wanted to take the information back. Sandra told me she didn’t want me talking about her fledgling relationship with the dark, handsome minister, because she was so afraid that any talk of it would jinx the whole thing.

  Miss Moses ignored my comment and got on with the conversation.

  “When I retired from the school system,” she explained, “I taught adults in my home at night. You know, I was married briefly—my husband died ten days after our wedding—and I did not have any children. I loved children, but I didn’t ever have myself any. I got plenty of nieces and nephews and godchildren, but none of my own.”

  “Oh, really?” I said, trying to sound casual, but I was thinking, Ten days!

  “Well,” Miss Moses said, obviously deciding to talk up a storm, “you should have seen the folks who used to line up for lessons at my home at night after they worked hard all day. Sometimes I would have to open a window in my front room, even in the wintertime, because of the way they smelled—from hard work in the fields outside Mulberry, grueling labor at the box factory, cleaning up some white woman’s house from top to bottom.”

  That really got my attention, because although my mother worked in an insurance-company office, my father was a laborer at the box factory in town. He always was good with his hands and did odd jobs, too, in the neighborhood. But his main job was at the corrugated-box factory. I guess women in my family have always been attracted to hardworking men who used their hands.

 

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