Betsey Brown (2 page)

“I told you, you had to be out of the bathroom in five minutes! What do you think I'm gonna do? Go to school stink on accounta you take so long, Margot,” Sharon was screaming round the corner from Betsey's room. How could she become a great anything with all this foolishness going on around her?

“Listen here, heifer. I'm gonna be in that bathroom in three minutes or you never gonna play with my jacks and I'ma tell
Jeannie not to speak to you ever again. Do you hear me? Do you
hear
me?”

Sharon was kicking the bathroom door with her saddles making black streaks long the sideboard when Jane rolled over in her bed to touch Greer, just once more before her hellish day began. Where was Betsey with her coffee? Why was Sharon shouting the devil out in the hall? How could all this be happening to her?

“Sharon, I am going to whip you good, if I hear you call your sister or anybody else a heifer. Do you hear me? Just wait your turn. The boys are finished and you'll have plenty of time.” Jane managed to raise her voice, if not her body. Something had to be done with all these children. “Greer, please, let's not have any more children. But can we make a little bitty bit of love?” Jane was tustled in a mass of auburn hair. Somehow her lavender nightgown was entwined in her arms beneath the pillows. She rolled toward her husband, who, as always when in a good mood, grabbed her reddish ringlets and pulled her mouth to his. The answer was yes, a long and sweet yes.

“Betsey, Betsey, where's my coffee?” Jane breathed deep, longing for more of her Greer and that caffeine. She could smell the coffee perking downstairs, which meant that Mama was up and about, making lunches for all the children. “Betsey, where is my coffee?” Greer nuzzled a little closer and Jane simmered down and was all purr and open. She forgot about coffee.

Betsey wasn't even dressed, and she hadn't gotten her mama's coffee or her lines right yet. She ran like the Holy Ghost down the back stairs to set up Jane's cup and saucer before Grandma had to do it and broke something. “Speak up Ike, an' 'spress yo'se'f” rambling through her mind, her little girl hips twitched the way she imagined Susan Ann's had after she left
Willetta in the street with nothing but her panties on. Not even a ponytail clasp was on that child once Susan Ann was done. Grandma sure enough had the coffee done.

“Seems to me a child could make an effort to take her hardworking mother a teeny ol' cup of coffee,” Grandma murmured in her Carolinian drawl. There was a way about Vida that was so lilting yet direct that Betsey sometimes thought her grandma had a bloodline connection to Scarlett O'Hara.

“I'm sorry, Grandma, but I was practicing my elocution.”

“You should have practiced your elocution last evening, instead of jumping all that colored double roping with those trashy gals from round the way.”

Grandma poured her daughter's coffee, knowing full well what was goin on upstairs. Her daughter didn't have no common sense, that was the problem. Awready there was a house fulla chirren and she wouldn't stop messin' with that Greer. Jane was lucky, Grandma thought. None of the chirren looked like him, all dark and kinky-headed. Now it was true that Betsey had a full mouth. Margot was chocolate brown. Sharon had a head fulla nappy hair. Allard was on the flat-nosed side. But in Grandma's mind Jane had been blessed, cause each of the chirren was sprightly and handsome on a Geechee scale, not them island ones but the Charlestonians who'd been light or white since slavery. But Grandma didn't like to think bout slavery. She was most white. Slaves and alla that had nothing to do with her family, until Jane insisted on bringing this Greer into the family and he kept making family. Lord knows who could help her.

“Here, Betsey, you carry this on up to your mama, and tell her I said that Allard needs to be looked at for the ringworm and Charlie needs a whipping for calling Sharon out of her
name and all the lunches are packed, but I do feel a mite weak and need to rest my bones. I do wish she would quit that old job social-workering and mind you chirren more. I surely do.”

Betsey took the coffee from Grandma ever so carefully. She was running late. Her teeth weren't even brushed yet and Charlie was in the bathroom for the second time. Mama still didn't have her coffee, and wouldn't have it when she imagined, cause Betsey drank the whole cup by the time she reached the top of the back stairs that twisted this way and that, leaving a girl time to dream of things to come and womanish ways.

When Betsey reached the top of the winding stairs with the empty cup, she quickly swallowed the little bit that had dropped into the saucer and with military precision made an about face, balancing her mother's wedding china in one hand, feigning a fan in the other, whispering, “Speak up Ike, 'spress yo'se'f.” She could hear Charlie and Sharon arguing about how long was the circumference of the world. Margot adding, “As big as your head.” Betsey almost dropped the delicate flowered cup rimmed with gold, seemingly atop a throne of its own. Jane was strolling down the hall, shouting the other way, “Betsey, where's my coffee?”

Sharon was trying to comb Margot's head a hair with a brush that looked like it was only big enough for Betsy Wetsy. “I can't help it. It's the only one I could find.” Margot was tying Allard's shoes as he looked around the ceilings for shadows where the spooks that swept down on him in his dreams must live. “I know they're up there, Sharon. Let's getta broom and beat em to the death. Okay?” Sharon had Margot making faces verging on distortion; that hair, that hair had to be combed or Mama was gonna have a fit. “Well, we could tie it with a shoestring in a ponytail,” Sharon conceded. Margot smiled so much
she cried one big tear. Allard kept trying to get their attention: “Listen, if you all don't help me beat out them spooks, I'm gonna burn em up.”

Together Sharon and Margot shouted, “Allard, keep your hands off them matches, do you hear?” Jane heard. Greer was apparently downstairs, already strains of Charlie Parker wafted through the house. Jane was powdering herself by her vanity in a gleam of nostalgia by her wedding photo. Oh that day had been so perfect, so soft and white. Whatta night they had at the Savoy. Why, she danced until she most fainted. Jane giggled and then regained her more official “mother's” stance as Betsey entered the room.

“Well, Betsey, I thought you must have gone all the way to Guatemala to get my coffee.”

“No, Mommy, I just was practicing my elocution, when the kids were making all this noise and you wanted your coffee and Grandma insisted on telling me how lucky we look the way we look because of Daddy. There was an awful lot goin on, Mama, honest.”

Jane smiled at her miracle child. The baby she thought she couldn't have. What an error of judgment that had been. Still and all, Betsey was her first baby and close to her heart in a peculiar way, as if some real part of her walked out the door every time Betsey went down the front stairs or leaned gossiping, girllike, over the back porch. Jane pulled Betsey to her, then took a few sips of coffee made exactly how she liked, milk in first, two sugars. And plenty of coffee. Jane still insisted on having her good china and cloth napkins for her coffee upstairs. “There's no reason to give up everything gracious on account of a few moments of hardship” was what she always said if Betsey brought a paper napkin or a mug to her room.

“Mama, you wanna listen to a little bit of my elocution preparation? I'm doing Mr. Paul Laurence Dunbar.”

Jane thought, taking her time mischievously, and then shook her head yes.

“Betsey, of course I want to hear your interpretation of Dunbar, but hurry. You know your daddy's getting the morning quiz ready.”

Betsey ran to her mama's closet and grabbed the first red womany thing she saw, a scarlet slip she draped round her hips. Jane's eyebrows rose, but she contained herself. After all, elocution was close to theater. Betsey stationed herself by her mother in front of the vanity, wanting to watch her every gesture and facial expression. Mama knew this poem awready, so she had to be good, or at least that's what she thought.

Jane thought anything her little girl did was just fine, but it pleased her that Betsey wanted to impress her.

 

“Who dat knockin' at de do'?

Why, Ike Johnson, yes, fu' sho!

Come in, Ike. I's mighty glad

You come down. I t'ought you's mad

At me 'bout de othah night,

An was stayin' 'way fu' spite.

Say, now, was you mad fu' true

W'en I kin' o' laughed at you?

Speak up, Ike, an 'spress yo'se'f.”

 

Betsey sashayed and threw her teeny hips, glinted her eyes, and coyly demonstrated her newly learned skills as coquette, much to her mother's delight. Jane hugged her girl and was about to offer some dramatic advice, when the morning rituals,
authorized and unauthorized, overshadowed them and interrupted that very special moment they'd shared.

“Who's got my geography book?”

“Come on, tie my shoes.”

“That dress is not yours. Give it here.”

“Lord, Lord, please help me with these chirren.”

“I'ma tell Daddy you took my books.”

“I bet you won't have no backside side, if he gets holdt to ya.”

“Come tie my shoes, please.”

“For God's sake, somebody tie Allard's shoes.”

“Margot, you better do something with that mess you call hair.”

“You said you would comb it for me.”

“She sure 'nough did.”

“Where's my geography book?”

“Somebody tie Allard's shoes, fore he trips over himself.”

“I'ma tell Daddy.” The refrain arose from everyone's lips.

No one could find Allard to tie his shoes. Meanwhile Greer had strapped his conga drum round his shoulder. It was the one he'd brought from Cuba where Sharon was conceived under a sky of shooting stars, or so the story went. As if he were a southern Mongo Santamaria, Greer mamboed up the back stairs, through the halls, and down the front steps, gathering the mass of family he called his own, chanting all the while.

 

“The Negro race is a mighty one
The work of the Negro is never done
Muscle, brains, and courage galore
Negroes in this house
Meet me at the back door
Oh! the Negro race is a mighty one
Each and every one of you is an example of one
Oh! the Negro race is a mighty one
We goin to show the world
What can be done
Cause the Negro race is a mighty one.”

 

Jane was not crazy about her children screaming at each other or about her husband's idea of reveille. Cuba, yes. St. Louis, no. St. Louis was still an old-fashioned place. With “Yes, M'ams” and “No, Sirs” grating Jane's ears every time she heard one of her children say sucha thing, but Greer swore it wouldn't hurt them and Greer knew a lot about the worlds Jane had never considered. Matisse, Gauguin, Pippin, Bearden, and Modigliani. Whenever Dizzy Gillespie came to town, there they were, justa waiting. If Chuck Berry was in a scrap with the law, there they were. Greer operating and Jane taking pictures. Sometimes she couldn't believe what she did for this man. Love and buckshot, music and street diagnoses, late-night feuds bout the future of the Negro race, whether DuBois or Walter White hadda place and where. That time DuBois had carried Betsey to bed was history. Everybody knew what a crotchety ol' figure of a man he was, but couldn't nobody but W.E.B. himself get that child to sleep. Was like the night Betsey'd hid in the back seat of the car to see Tina Turner, as if nobody would want to collect a ticket from her or see some I.D. from an eleven-year-old at the bawdiest night spot on the wrong side of the tracks. Saying “I wanna be an Ikette” didn't do it. Greer had to hightail it back to the house with his girl, trying to explain that Tina Turner didn't accept applications from young women under the age of eighteen. From that second, Betsey decided she would do everything just like Tina Turner do. Greer knew that and that
worried him, and then again, he was assured Betsey'd be good at whatever she put her mind on.

Why couldn't Greer see what kind of an influence he was having on the children, Jane worried. Her sister would never have let Charlie stay with them if she'd known all this was going on.

Betsey'd run off behind her father to get ready for the morning quiz. Up and down and round about the house they went with Greer chanting, the children dancing.

They all marched into the kitchen where Grandma sat in a corner by the window that opened on an oak tree frequented by bluejays she fed whenever something was simply beyond her. She hummed, “I been 'buked, & I been scorned.” Her daughter had married a mad man, bringing all this Africa mess into her house. Low-down music and prize-fighters at his heels soon as he stepped through the door. Nothing but the lowest of the low appealed to him, cept for her daughter, Jane. How could this be going on in her family? What would her father have thought in his starched trolley-driving uniform? What would her poor early-passt-on mother have made of a household run in such a brazen manner?

Greer paraded the children in file past Grandma to get their lunches and the 35¢ he left in stacks for each of them. Then he began.

“Betsey, what's the most standard of blues forms?”

“Twelve-bar blues, Daddy.”

“Charlie, who invented the banjo?”

“Africans who called it a banjar, Uncle Greer.”

“Sharon, what is the name of the President of Ghana?”

“Um . . . Nkrumah, I think.”

“Thinking's not good enough, a Negro has got to know. Besides, it's Kwame Nkrumah. Margot, where is Trinidad?”

“Off the coast of Venezuela, but it's English-speaking.”

“Allard.”

Everybody turned around, realizing that Allard was nowhere to be seen. Grandma tutted to herself in the corner. At least one of the chirren wasn't taken in by this mess. Yet if Allard was missing, he was up to something terrible. That boy just loved fires.