How to Make an American Quilt (32 page)

She may stop quilting, ask Glady Joe to reread a passage, then repeat a section of it to herself; or she may ask questions or comment on what is being read. Sometimes Glady Joe sets the book in her lap, asks Anna what she thinks this or that means, the way in which it belongs in the story.

After
Wuthering Heights
comes
Jane Eyre
, the “natural extension,” says Glady Joe, cracking open the novel. Anna is taken with the character of Jane: plain, honorable, smart, naïve Jane. She loves her backbone and is drawn to her in an altogether different way than she was to Heathcliff; she loves his badness as much as she loves Jane’s goodness. Glady Joe and Anna disagree about the ending, as well as the reasons behind Jane’s affection for Mr. Rochester.

“It is because he is so great,” sighs Glady Joe.

“It is because she is a domestic and lonely,” corrects Anna.

Next comes
Pride and Prejudice
, which Anna does not care for (“Just like white folks,” she thinks) and
Daisy Miller
, until Anna places her work in her lap one night and says, “Can’t we get away from those English?” Everything has gone downhill since the Brontës. Glady Joe seems hurt that Anna is not warming to the same books that she does and says, “Henry James is American, not English.”

“Same thing,” says Anna.

Glady Joe tries
Madame Bovary
(“No,” says Anna); then
Anna Karenina
(“No,” says Anna). Then Pauline sends Anna a handwritten copy of a story called “Spunk” by Zora Neale Hurston.

Neale like me
, thinks Anna.

Pauline’s accompanying note reads:
I read this in someone else’s magazine but I wanted you to have it so I copied it for you
. The shape and style of Pauline’s handwriting causes Anna’s throat to close and eyes to smart with tears.

And it is this story Anna reads to Glady Joe one night as she sits working on her first sample patch. Who says at the end, “I wonder who killed Spunk.”

Anna says, “Now that’s a story.” She recognizes something that has been lacking in the continuing stream of stories and novels that Glady Joe has been reading to her. Pauline, now retired, regularly mails stories and poems to Anna, since she is in San Francisco with access to publications featuring black writers. Anna feels like a bridge between the literature of Glady Joe and Pauline: one sending her tales of her mother’s culture, the other reading stories of her father’s culture.

When Anna has a story to read, Glady Joe works her quilting sampler and listens. When Glady Joe reads, Anna works her own quilts. It is not long before Glady Joe tentatively tries her hand at Anna’s quilts, placing the backing to the top piece, rescuing Anna from the tedium of the work.

M
RS
. R
UBENS SAYS
something to Anna regarding adoption. “But I’m not sending him out. I’m bringing him up myself,” Anna says.

Mrs. Rubens acts as if she has received a shock with a hot wire. She blurts out, “Oh, but you can’t!”

“Yes,” Anna tells her, “I can and I will.”

“But, Anna,” says Mrs. Rubens, awkwardly fumbling for Anna’s hand, “don’t you want what is best for him? Don’t you want him to have a good life?”

Anna wants to say,
What are you going on about? My child will still be called Negro and unless everything in this country changes before next week, my baby will have a rare chance at a “good life”; he will only have a “Negro life,” which is made so hard even in the best of circumstances. Besides which, I am what is best for him
.

But she only says, “I’ll do that. I’ll give him what I can.” She says this like she isn’t scared, like she isn’t seventeen and soon to be unemployed.

G
LADY
J
OE HAS BEGUN
seeing Arthur Cleary, a college boy, not from Grasse. It was actually Hy who brought him home first, with her coterie of friends, but it was Glady Joe who held his interest. Even a blind man could see that, Anna notes.

W
HEN
A
NNA IS TAKEN
to the hospital to deliver her baby, she finds herself in a segregated ward. Actually, it is a Not White ward, as Anna calls it, since she is sharing a large room with two women of Latin descent and another who looks to be Chinese, maybe part black. Anna is part white, but obviously not the right part, as she likes to say. The staff warms to her because she is so young and pretty, with her perfect brown skin, full mouth, the smart line of her nose, strength of her jaw, balance of her eyes.

Even the mrs. in San Francisco and the people on the ranch used to say,
She’s colored but not truly colored, if you know what I mean
(whispering this last part). Perhaps her employers were nice to her because her features carried the vague underscoring of their own
racial features; without awareness, responding “favorably” to them. Not that they want to claim her, thinks Anna, this part of her over which she has no control and is constantly judged.

Anna wonders if this is what the father of her baby made love to: the mix of her blood. Was he drawn to her kindred to him or to the contrast she posed?—for surely she embodied both in equal measure. She kisses Marianna’s bald head.

G
LADY
J
OE AND
H
Y
come to see Marianna, though Hy fidgets so you can see that she’d rather be somewhere else, her bright smile not fooling Anna, and the sharpness of Glady Joe’s voice when she speaks to her sister giving her away as well.

“Mom sends her best,” says Hy, moving the blanket aside to get a good look at Marianna, hidden there in the circle of Anna’s arm.

“Thank her for me,” says Anna, not looking up. Marianna’s eyes do not focus and she seems to flinch at the passing of a hand high above her eyes, or delight in the white uniform of the nurse as she leans across the child to take Anna’s temperature.

“How do you feel? When do you go home?” asks Glady Joe.

“A couple of days. I got some ladies coming to see me from the church.”
Adoption ladies
. She does not say this, because she is not going to let them take her baby. (Mrs. Rubens alluded to the “shame” of raising a child without a father, while Anna wanted to scream that she could not be made to feel any more ashamed than the townspeople have already made her feel at being seventeen, unmarried, and pregnant. Been treated that way for so long that she had grown accustomed to it and it hardly touched her now.)