The Twelve Tribes of Hattie (14 page)

“You gon’ play or not?” Ray said.

“Well, I didn’t come to watch. But I have some business to take care of first.”

The players exchanged glances.

“What you mean, you got business? We got a man traveled all the way from Boston to play in this game.” Ray picked up his stone and jiggled it in his fist. “We supposed to wait on you?

“We got business too. Shit,” the same unknown player said.

Ray glanced at him, and the man went back to fingering his money. Ray stood. He took a step toward Lawrence.

“You holding up the game, and you know I don’t like nobody coming in and out. This ain’t the goddamn county fair. You best sit yourself down.”

The woman in the green dress said, “He come in here with a high yellow gal and a baby. They waiting on him.” Before Ray could ask, she added, “I seen them come in when I went to get y’alls’ coffee.”

“Oh, you brought your woman. Bring her down here then,” Ray said.

“She’s not that kind of lady.”

Ray laughed. “You a sucker for the dictie ones. Fine. You got a hour. One hour.”

They left the room, and Scoot pushed two twenties into Lawrence’s hands.

“You remember the way out?” he asked.

“I’ve been coming down here since before you took your first step,” Lawrence said.

“You be taking your last if you ain’t back here in a hour.”

He’d win hundreds tonight, enough to buy some furniture to get them started. He could make an excuse for his absence. He’d tell her something to put her off. For now Hattie needed to think Lawrence had given up gambling—for her sake, so she wouldn’t be scared. She’d be angry, but the boardinghouse was nice, and Mrs. James would make Hattie a nice breakfast and fuss over Ruthie.

Lawrence took the steps two at a time. He had the tingle in his throat that he got when he was playing and knew he was going to win. It never failed—when Lawrence had that tingle everything went his way. Things would be fine with Hattie. The apprehension he felt on the drive was gone. Playing cards made him feel like himself, sharp and optimistic.

He left a matchbox in the tobacco shop’s door latch so he could get back in. Hattie is waiting for me, Lawrence thought. Not for August, for me. Isn’t that something!

He turned into the main hall.

“Hattie?”

She wasn’t there.

“Hattie?” he called.

She wasn’t near the ticket window or on any of the benches in the waiting area. He went to the restrooms and stood at the ladies room door listening. A faucet turned on. Stupid, he thought. I’m running around like an idiot and she’s just freshening up. Lawrence returned to the main hall, Hattie would think he was crazy if she found him hanging around outside the bathroom. He trained his eyes on the hallway from which she would emerge. A minute passed and then another, and finally the hall filled with the clip-clip of heels against the marble floor.

A woman carrying a hatbox came out of the hallway. No one followed her.

“Excuse me, ma’am,” Lawrence called. “Ma’am?”

The woman looked startled.

“I’m sorry to bother you, ma’am. But my wife and baby were waiting for me here, and I can’t … I wonder if you’d seen them in the restroom.”

The woman looked him over, then said, “I did see somebody a while ago. I think she went out the front doors.”

Hattie had gone outside to wait in the car. She was tired, poor thing. She and Ruthie had probably fallen asleep. Lawrence crossed the street and peered into the Buick; they were not there.

He ran back into the station. The ticket agent was asleep in his glass booth.

“Sir!” Lawrence said, rapping on the window. The man started awake and narrowed his eyes at Lawrence. He was sallow under the fluorescent lights, a few strands of hair stuck to his sweaty forehead.

“What you want? No more trains tonight,” he said.

“I’m sorry, sir, but did you see a woman standing here with a baby? Just a few minutes ago.”

“Yeah, I seen her,” the ticket man said.

“Do you know where she went?” Lawrence asked.

“Philadelphia, I reckon. Bought a ticket for the ten seventeen.”

“What platform?”

“It’s ten twenty-four; that train’s gone.”

“What platform!” Lawrence shouted.

“You watch your tone,” the man said. He leaned forward in his seat, “Track nine, but I’m telling you that train left.”

Lawrence ran. There wasn’t anything on track nine at all: not a porter or a janitor or an off-duty conductor. He couldn’t even hear an echo of the wheels on the track or see the tiniest glimmer from the train’s tail lamps. A hint of diesel perfumed the air. Lawrence knew, though he intended to search the car for a note or Hattie’s carry case, that the diesel fumes were all that was left of her.

AT FOUR
in the morning the front door opened and shut. August peered into the living room and saw Floyd taking his shoes off in the foyer. That boy was going the wrong way in life, a grown man, still living at home and sneaky. Didn’t nobody know where he was half the time. But August had a good idea of what he was up to. He had a vision of Floyd coming home and saying he’d gotten a girl into trouble, then he’d never make anything of his life or his horn playing. August tried to stand, but he was drunk, and his legs wouldn’t move after so many hours with Bell asleep on his lap. “Floyd!” August hissed, trying not to wake Bell. “Floyd!” By the time August got to his feet, Floyd had already gone up the stairs. August carried Bell to the sofa in the living room. He took his last swig of cordial and smoked his last cigarette.

In his hours at the dining room table August hadn’t resolved anything. He hadn’t figured out what he’d feed his children for breakfast. He hadn’t decided if he would let Hattie take them, or if he ought to go to Baltimore and cut Lawrence down. He imagined the confrontation, though he’d never met Lawrence. He would be handsome and high yellow, and his blood would run from his nose and mouth when August hit him. But August didn’t figure a fight would really fix anything. He couldn’t stand that he was unable to act, that he needed Hattie to come along and solve the problem of Hattie having left him.

The first floor of the house stank of smoke. August thought he might sit there until morning. He couldn’t face the bedroom, but before dawn he’d have to go up there or risk one of the children coming down and seeing him wrinkled and drunk and helpless.

Out on the street a motor idled. The shine from the headlight panned across the living room. In those few seconds of illumination August saw the papers scattered on the floor, shoes by the door, and the rug bunched up in a corner. That was no good. The children shouldn’t come down in the morning and see the house a mess. He struggled up from the armchair and began straightening the sofa cushions.

The door opened, and there was Hattie with Margaret in one arm and her travel satchel in the other. She looked like a carpetbagger.

Hattie stepped in and closed the door behind her. August reached to turn on the lamp by the sofa.

“Leave it off,” Hattie said. “If you don’t mind.”

They stood facing each other in the near darkness, the light from a streetlamp shining through the window.

“That man drop you back here?” August asked.

“No, I came in a taxi.”

“From where?”

“Train station.”

“Where’s he?”

“Baltimore.”

The thing to do was to insult her or slap her or run her out into the night. She’d left him with all their children. She was holding another man’s baby in her arms. Anyone would agree that he ought to do something terrible to her, but she had been gone fifteen hours, and in that fifteen hours his life had crumbled like a lump of dry earth.

Bell woke. “Mother!” she said and ran to hug Hattie. She patted Bell on the shoulder a couple of times and then said, “You’ll wake the baby. Go on to bed.” Hattie stepped out of her daughter’s embrace.

When Bell was gone, Hattie said, “I won’t be seeing him again.”

“Why you come back?” August asked.

“My children.”

“He do something?”

“Don’t ask me that. Don’t ask me anything about him. I never asked you.”

“I never went off nowhere,” August said.

“You never had reason to,” Hattie replied.

She sat at the edge of the sofa with the baby in her lap.

“I can go to Marion’s in the morning. I just … I didn’t know where else to go tonight.”

“These children been terrified.”

“You think I don’t know what a mess I’ve made? My God, August, I’m all done in.”

“You!” He could not tell her that he had not even been able to feed them without her. “It only be worse for them if you gone tomorrow too.”

“It smells like a speakeasy in here. You ought to let in some air,” Hattie said.

August went around the room opening the windows as Hattie asked. The night smells came in: the dew on the grass, the neighbor’s garbage cans, the marigolds in Hattie’s planter on the front steps.

“You cain’t think everything’s alright between us. Ain’t nothing alright between us,” he said.

“When was it ever alright, August?”

“I don’t know how I’m supposed to look at Margaret every day.”

August heard a small whimpering, a quiet sniffling that could have been the baby, but it stopped so abruptly he knew it was Hattie. His stomach churned with the liquor. He stood in front of her and lifted his arms out to his sides. It was not an invite to embrace but a resignation, as if to say, here we are; this is what we have and there’s nothing to be done about it. He dropped his arms and sat, with a groan, on the sofa. There were too many disappointments to name and too much heartbreak. They were beyond punishment or forgiveness, beyond what they had inflicted on each other, beyond love.

“I’ve been calling her Ruthie,” Hattie said.

“What for?”

“I want … I would like it if you would call her that too.”

“Ruthie,” August repeated.

“Please.”

August nodded in the darkened room. He conceded, though Hattie could not see him.

Ella

1956

E
LLA WOKE UP
wailing and wouldn’t stop. Though Hattie rocked her and changed her and fed her, though she gave her a lump of sugar to suck and wrapped her feet in a warm cloth and rubbed her stomach in case it was colic that agitated her. Three hours passed, three hours of high-pitched shrieking that would have made a dog howl. The other children couldn’t stand it. They left for school early, ran out of the house with their shirts buttoned wrong and their shoelaces untied. August bounced the baby on his knee to no avail, then gave up and left for the docks to see if he might pick up a few hours of work. “Back by twelve!” he called on his way out the door.

Hattie was alone with her daughter. Ella’s crying unnerved her, made her feel desperate and shabby and frightened. She went out onto the front steps hoping the morning air would calm them both. It was nearly nine o’clock and the block was quiet after the rush of children going to school and women on the way to city buses bound for the white neighborhoods, the men in their suits or their coveralls heading to a shop or a factory or, rarely, an office building. Hattie thought she smelled a hint of wood smoke on the breeze, though it wasn’t cold enough to light the furnaces, and besides, all of the houses on the block used coal. Autumn always made her remember the wood-burning stoves of her girlhood. A neighbor woman walked by. She nodded curtly and continued on her way.

Hattie did her morning chores with Ella bound to her in a sheet that she wound around her chest. She washed the breakfast bowls, emptied the drip pan beneath the icebox, and counted out a few coins for the milkman. It was important to do what needed doing, no matter the day or the circumstances. She took her children’s fall and winter shoes from the hall closet and rotated them as she did each October. Shoes that had been outgrown by the older children went to their younger siblings, and the oldest child got a new pair when there was money or, when there wasn’t, squeezed her feet into the pair from the year before. Hattie reached up to the highest shelf and pulled down the box where she kept the tiny Mary Janes and the soft leather lace-ups that Philadelphia and Jubilee had worn a few times thirty years earlier. Theirs were the only shoes in the house that had never been handed down or reused. Hattie meant to have them bronzed. She cleaned them with saddle soap and a soft cloth that she kept in the box for that purpose. Ella liked the smell and stopped crying.

It was ten-thirty when the chores were finished. Hattie unwrapped the baby and lay down beside her on the bed, but her legs twitched, so she hopped up to dust the dresser. Dust motes floated in the column of sunlight that angled from the window. Ella reached into the air and closed her fist around something, a bit of dust perhaps or a feather from the comforter. The previous summer a storm had blown dogwood blossoms in through the bedroom window, a tumult of pink petals pirouetting through the room and landing on the bed’s graying sheets and flattened pillows. Ella was too young to have shared Hattie’s delight.

Hattie poured some wood soap onto the dresser, her mama’s dresser, and began wiping the top. Years ago August set a cup of tea on it and stained the wood. Hattie nearly hit him when she discovered the stain, she nearly had. He’d promised to sand and refinish it. Well.

Ella sat in the center of the bed; her chin dipped into the roll of fat around her neck, that chin with its little cleft. Hattie sang to her while she polished the dresser:
Mama’s little baby loves shortenin’, shortenin’. Mama’s little baby loves shortenin’ bread
. The baby extended her arm—her left arm, Hattie noted because she wanted to remember her daughter in the smallest details. Her nails needed clipping. She’ll sleep now, Hattie thought, and I will watch her sleep and file it away in my mind with her russet curls and her apple butter skin and the way she makes a sound like a cat purring before she drifts off. At two o’clock Hattie’s sister Pearl would arrive. At two she’d take Ella and they’d drive away, back down to Georgia, and Hattie would stand on the porch and watch her go.

IT HAD BEEN
four years since Hattie last held a baby in her arms. She was forty-six years old and thought she was finished having children. When she missed her period, she hoped her change of life had come. She’d had enough of blood and milk and birthing. But then came the swollen breasts and the craving for shaved ice and cucumber slices and the familiar pulsing in her belly. She never had gotten over that pulsing, two hearts beating in her body. When she felt that, she knew, no need to go to the doctor. She told August while they were lying in bed one evening.

“You’ll have to get the Moses basket out of the attic,” she said.

He’d bolted upright. Hattie could feel him smiling, and she wanted to turn over and slap him. All of the years of their unhappiness hadn’t diminished their physical need for each other. Days passed in which she hardly said a word to August, but their nights were another thing, their bodies were another thing entirely. Hattie said and did things with August she was ashamed of. In the middle of the night when they were lying in bed panting and sweaty, they would stare at each other, stunned. She didn’t know what to make of this sporadic urgency with him. It had confounded and humiliated her for the thirty years of their marriage. These endless pregnancies. And worse, her body’s insistence on a man who was the greatest mistake of her life. She was only sixteen when they met. Too young to understand that getting her alone at his brother’s house was all August wanted from their courtship. After, when he tired of her and stopped coming around, Hattie never let on that she was heartbroken, sick to her stomach, couldn’t-sleep-at-night heartbroken. Mama was right to call him my ruin, Hattie thought. If I had known things would turn out this way, I would have thrown myself in the river after I buried my twins.

“Maybe you can see about picking up again at the Navy Yard,” Hattie said. “Mrs. Mark might not need me anymore. She’s moving down to Florida to be with her grandchildren.”

“You worrying already. We gon’ work it out,” August answered. “It won’t be no harder than with the rest. Ain’t none of them gone hungry yet.”

Haven’t they? Hattie thought.

Down the hall the children slept three to a bedroom; Hattie could almost hear them growing, their wrists lengthening and poking out beyond the cuffs of their shirts, their feet outgrowing their shoes, their shoulders widening and pulling the fabric of their coats taut. For the last two weeks she fed them navy beans with ham bones for dinner and powdered milk and oats for breakfast. They were lean; they had a hard look that was disturbing in a child’s face.

Ella was born at the end of an unusually hot April. Hattie went into labor while standing over a tub of laundry she’d taken in to make extra money. Her labor was scarcely three hours, and after the doctor left the house, a few of Hattie’s neighbors came, women from the block who turned up for births and funerals or an occasional glass of tea on the porch. They cleaned up the blood, looked after the other children, and brought some of whatever they’d cooked that day: a pot of string beans, a platter of chicken. The oldest of them, Willie, was from somewhere in the Carolinas. Willie had been old for as long as anyone could remember. She was a mud-colored woman with a drawl so thick it sounded as though she’d come up from Bugaloo the day before. The younger women thought Willie countrified, though most of them were from the country themselves. They were, most of them, perpetually donning and polishing their northern-city selves, molting whatever little southern town they or their families had come from five or ten or twenty years before, whatever red dirt roads or sharecropped fields—or bragging about their families’ wide porches in whatever good Negro neighborhood they’d lived in, which was just a roundabout way of demanding that Philadelphia give them their due.

Willie took Hattie’s afterbirth and buried it under the oak in front of the house. The tree was a great big old thing with roots so thick and strong they broke through the squares of concrete. “So the child’s spirit will stay close to home,” Willie said. The neighborhood women did not want to admit they believed in such things, but they always let Willie into their birthing rooms. Later they’d cluck their tongues and shake their heads and say, “It’s a shame Willie never learned any better.” But they were too smart to turn their backs on the possibility of luck or fortune or a blessing, in any form it might take. If Willie’s juju offered some promise that their children would prosper in Philadelphia, then so be it. Hattie thought them naïve and stupidly hopeful, though she too allowed Willie to perform her ritual. And of course the other woman of Wayne Street had been wounded and chastened by the North, just as Hattie had been, but she was so insistent on the singularity of her disappointment she could not see she wasn’t alone in her circumstance.

At eleven o’clock Hattie still hadn’t finished dusting the dresser. Ella fussed, so Hattie picked her up. The room smelled of Murphy Oil Soap. In her distraction Hattie had poured too much soap, and there were quarter-sized dollops across the surface of the wood. Hattie dabbed at the soap with one hand while she bounced Ella in the other arm. Across the street a pink ribbon was tacked to the door of one of the neighbor’s houses. A girl had been born there a few days before. From a distance the ribbon looked clean and new, though the edges were frayed and there were small holes where it had been nailed to doors up and down the block. Six months before, it had been tacked to Hattie’s door for Ella’s birth. Hattie tried to recall where the blue one could have gotten to; it had been some time since a boy had been born.

“Look, Ella. Look at your birth ribbon.” Hattie tapped the window to draw Ella’s attention, and the tip of her finger left an imprint. She pressed Ella’s fingertip against the glass, then her entire hand. The imprint might stay there a month, maybe longer if Hattie didn’t wash it away. She had an urge to press Ella’s small hand against all the windowpanes and mirrors in the house. Long after she was gone down to Georgia, the outline of her hand would ghost up through the condensation when the bathroom filled with steam.

Hattie could take Ella and run. She didn’t have to give her baby to Pearl, she could escape to a remote little town where the winters were mild and they didn’t know anybody. Hattie ran downstairs to the kitchen to count the emergency money in the tea tin: fourteen dollars. That wouldn’t get them very far. She hadn’t left Philadelphia for years, but she had a clear sense of the shape of her part of the world, at least those few states she’d seen—the Georgia of her birth and the states she, Marion, Pearl, and their mother had passed through on their way to Philadelphia when Hattie was fifteen. She had traced the route they’d taken in one of her children’s geography books: up through the Carolinas, then through Virginia and Maryland and into Pennsylvania.

There were no bathrooms in the Jim Crow train cars when Hattie and her sisters and mother left Georgia in 1923, and most of the southern stations didn’t have Negro restrooms, so they had to relieve themselves outside. Three stood watch while the fourth did her business. The first time Hattie couldn’t go for the shame of it. Her mama went last, and the white conductor yelled at them from a few yards up the track, “Y’all better come on if you coming!” What an outrage it was to see her mother—who was never without her hair done up in a bun, who could have passed for white but wouldn’t, who was more mannered and proper than the Queen of England—squatted in the kudzu with her skirt around her waist and a white man bellowing at her. That same conductor stood waiting for them at the entrance to the Negro car a few minutes later. He had his hands in his pockets and swayed on his heels watching them walk along the track toward him. He winked at Mama. He pressed his body into theirs as they climbed up into the car. Hattie’s mama said nothing, but she flushed crimson at her neck and her breath came in angry bursts. After that, they’d only gone to the bathroom when one of them was nearly doubled over from the pain of holding it.

It was a terrible trip, though something astonishing had happened. Hattie woke in the middle of the night to the clack of the wheels on the track and the rain rapping against the window, the opaque purple sky a tent against which the trees pressed. The journey had lifted her out of the plainness of her life. In Georgia she was one of many, undifferentiated from others, even in her own mind, but on the train to Philadelphia she became acutely aware of what was inviolate in her. She felt herself a single red flower in a field of green grass.

If Hattie and Ella ran away, they could be like that all of the time, two red poppies. Ella tried to fit a silver dollar into her mouth. It was 11:30. Hattie mashed up some peas and put them in a yellow bowl. She spooned the green mush into Ella’s mouth while the baby trilled like a bright little bird and grabbed at the spoon. Hattie kissed the top of her baby’s head and wept. She’d have to remember to tell Pearl that Ella liked peas.

PEARL FUSSED
with the gold clasp on the buckle of her purse. Her husband, Benny, glanced at her from the driver’s seat. She fished her compact from her bag and opened it, taking care to angle the mirror away from the sun so it wouldn’t catch the light and flash in Benny’s eyes while he drove. Her hair had napped a bit at the hairline despite the careful pressing she’d given it before they left Macon. She had hoped the press would hold during the two-day drive to Philadelphia. She’d packed her hot comb just in case, though Benny had said they wouldn’t stop at a hotel.

“Negro hotels aren’t worth a damn,” he’d said when she asked where they would sleep. “Nothing but whores and bedbugs.” Pearl cringed. She hated when he was vulgar.