Embracing Darkness (22 page)

“Don’t do this, Georgiana,” Sister Ignatius mumbled incoherently. “Don’t do this to that little girl.”

Suddenly it was Ellen F. and Nurse Ross all over again, the nurturer abandoning the child.

“Take it back, Georgiana!” Sister Ignatius said, tears now rolling down her face. They were genuine tears, not for herself but for someone who was now just as she herself had once been—orphaned and alone.

Later it would be reported that Mrs. Georgiana Benson had died not of a broken heart, as some believed, but rather by asphyxiation while she slept.

“Whatever the cause,” Sister Ignatius told Father Poole, “that child is all alone now.”

“I know, Sister,” he answered. “God help her.”

“Never mind about God,” Sister Ignatius replied harshly.

He looked at her, surprised.

“What would Ben Benson have you do, Father?” she added.

The priest thought long and hard on that question as the nun, whom many had underestimated and misunderstood, walked side by side with her boss away from the three graves behind the Benson residence.

FOURTEEN
The Newcomers
 

Ten-year-old Jonas Hodges woke up just before dawn on the Saturday morning after the triple funeral. He put on his slippers, tossed his oversized robe over his small frame, and made his way to the kitchen from the floor mat that he called a bed. The household was quiet, as the speakeasy downstairs always closed its doors at 4:00 a.m., and nobody would return until 5:00 the next afternoon. So it was between those hours that the entire building was empty except for the Hodges family. Adding to the peacefulness of the house was the fact that Mr. Hodges had finally found employment, which to the delight of his family had resulted in a hiatus of Ezra Hodges’s physically abusing his wife and son.

The Hodges home had been, for the past few hours anyway, quiet. Jonas was grateful for the fact that his father finally had found steady work. There was nothing the son hated more than when his father used to return home drunk late at night. Ezra always claimed that he’d been out searching for work when his wife, smelling the heavy odor of cheap wine or rotgut whisky on his breath, knew very well he’d been drinking their already beleaguered savings away.

The Negro family had been in the Northeast for a short while, settling down temporarily in the southern New Hampshire hamlet of Holly, where they had arrived in late September of 1929. They were newly arrived from Boston, a developed city with infinitely more opportunities for an able-bodied man in his mid-thirties, yet because of his skin color work offers always eluded Ezra Hodges. So Ezra, having walked his feet all the way down to his ankles with nothing to show for it, finally had enough of failure and began drinking all day, every day, by the time they’d settled in Boston.

It wasn’t till they’d been in Boston about a month that his wife Wilma decided finally to say something to her husband. “Ezra, you know you be burnin’ through this money so bad we ain’t gonna have any bread on the table soon if you keep it up.”

It had taken Wilma weeks to drum up enough courage to say this to Ezra, since the man she had loved for the past thirteen years had only recently become violent. Afraid as she had grown of her husband in that short while, she was now thinking of their son, Jonas, who was experiencing firsthand the physical abuse she herself now suffered.

It had started one night during their second week in Boston when Ezra arrived home about twenty minutes late for dinner. Wilma had gone over to their small wood-burning stove, shoveled some plain beans and potatoes into a plate, and taken it over to her husband who, since he’d come in, had been shouting and carrying on from pure frustration.

“Ain’t no white man in this town wanna give a nigga like
me
a job. Not a one! I be walkin’ up an’ down Boylston Street, back an’ forf, and I can’t even find me a job shovelin’ horseshit! These white folks’d rather have their own kids be doin’ it, so dey don’ need no black man comin’ aroun’!”

Wilma brought the plate to her husband, who was now seated at the head of the table. The plate trembled in her hand as he continued his rant.

“I tell you, woman. I gots a good mind to just up an’ leave. To hell with all this! What I gotta be bustin’ my balls walkin’ these streets all day, every day lookin’ for work when I knows no work ain’t ever gonna find a nigga’ like me?”

As Ezra finished speaking, he pounded his fist on the table just as Wilma approached with the plate. The sound startled his wife, and she spilled the beans and potatoes onto her husband’s lap.

Ezra jumped up in a fury and shouted in a drunken rage, “GODDAMN, WOMAN!”

Wilma retreated slowly, seeing the anger flood her husband’s face. “I’m sorry, Ezra. You done startled me!”

Jonas had never heard such fear in his mother’s voice. Ezra stomped wildly around the room and then, seeing the fireplace, ran over and kicked out a thick burning stick. Stomping on it until it was no longer aflame, he took off his shirt, his sinewy muscles gleaming in the dim light, wrapped his hand and picked up the firebrand, still smoking hot.

“COME HERE, WOMAN!” yelled Ezra. “I’S GOT TO TEACH YOU A LESSON.”

“No! Please! Please don’t!” she begged Ezra. At that moment Jonas’s pity for his father ended, and the boy’s sole concern became his mother.

Knowing that she couldn’t dodge Ezra much longer, and wanting to spare Jonas from seeing his father attack his mother, Wilma ran away from the table, pushing through the makeshift curtain that separated their bedroom from the apartment’s main area.

“I GOTCHA NOW WOMAN,” shouted Ezra. “YOU AIN’T GETTIN’ AWAY!” He disappeared behind the curtain after her, the smoking wood still gripped firmly in his hand. As soon as Ezra went in after her, Jonas heard his mother shriek, “EZRA! NO!”

Jonas began to sob uncontrollably, sinking his face into his hands. From the other side of the curtain he could hear the sound of clothes tearing. “YOU AIN’T NEVER GONNA DO DAT SHIT AGAIN, WOMAN, ARE YOU?” Jonas heard his mother moaning, “No, I promise, Ezra. Please don’t!”

Jonas flinched as he heard the sound of the stick. Wilma continued to scream as it smacked her backside. He then heard his father shout in unison with the sound of the stick whipping, “YOU AIN’T NEVER GONNA DO ME WRONG AGAIN, WOMAN! YOU HEAR ME?”

That was Boston.

Now that they were in Holly, Wilma wanted things to be different. She was willing to forget about the many beatings she had endured at the hands of her husband. She loved him and knew that the alcohol had turned Ezra into the beast he’d become. During their first weeks in Holly, Ezra, hung over as he was every morning, would get up out of bed, down two cups of black coffee, and make his way out of the house with Jonas. He insisted on taking the boy with him while he looked for work, hoping that wherever Ezra found employment there would also be work for his son. Ezra didn’t think much of school for Jonas, having himself been a dropout in the third grade. He believed that schooling was for white children, even though that sort of thinking had grown out of favor among his black contemporaries.

“White folks think we do bes’ where we be, so we stayin’ right where we be,” he’d say when Jonas cautiously mentioned a desire to go to school and make friends.

Realizing that his daily ritual was pointless, and finding it more and more difficult to wake up at dawn with a splitting headache and do nothing but walk the streets all day, Ezra resigned himself to sleeping all through the morning. Soon, however, he began sleeping into the early afternoon. That suited Jonas just fine, as he hated walking from one side of Holly to the other while his father solicited work.

Now in Holly for a few weeks and having found no employment, Ezra Hodges started going after his son Jonas. It began when Jonas tried to defend his mother as his father came at her with an empty wine bottle. What set Ezra off was that Wilma had decided to wash her husband’s one and only pair of trousers, which were filthy with the stains of spilled alcohol and stank like an ashtray. When Ezra awoke at a quarter past two in the afternoon, he couldn’t find his trousers.

“Where are my trousers, woman?” he said.

“Well, Ezra. I done put them in the laundry,” Wilma replied. “They was dirty and smelled bad.”

His eyes lit up in a fury. “AN’ WHAT YOU THINK I GONNA DO?” he roared. “JUS’ WALTZ OUT DIS HOUSE IN MY BLOOMERS?”

Wilma said nervously, “Ezra, I juss figure you gonna be sleepin’ all day. I didn’t think you’d be needin’ ’em.”

“SLEEPIN’ ALL DAY? IS DAT WHAT YOU THINK I BE DOIN’? DON’T I LEAVE DISS HOUSE EVERY DAY LOOKIN’ FOR SOME’IN TO DO WIF MYSELF? DON’T I?”

As he lunged at her, Wilma ran out of the bedroom through the same curtain that had separated their sleeping quarters from the rest of the apartment back in Boston. Ezra ran to the table and grabbed the first thing he could, an empty wine bottle from the night before. He went for her with the bottle as Jonas walked into the main room from his own partitioned quarters.

“You get back in der, boy!” commanded Ezra.

Jonas suspected that Ezra was planning to use the bottle against his mother. With as much courage as he could gather, Jonas screamed, “YOU LEAVE MY MAMMA ALONE!” and ran over to his mother, extending his arms in an effort to shield her body with his.

Ezra grabbed his son by the top of his overalls. A sound of ripping cloth could be heard as Jonas struggled to break free from his father’s vice-like grip. With his free hand Ezra lifted up the wine bottle and smashed it over Jonas’s head. Wilma simultaneously shouted, “JONAS!” and pulled her son away from Ezra.

The mother immediately forgot all fear of her husband as she frantically brought Jonas to her room. Pulling down the curtain that had served as their bedroom door, she wrapped it around the boy’s head. Jonas lay on the bed where his mother had put him, not moving a muscle and staring into space.

By this time Ezra had stormed out, shame and terror assaulting his brain. Halfway down the stairwell Ezra collapsed, burying his head in his hands and weeping.

The contrition didn’t last long. When Ezra returned a short time later, Jonas was resting his now bandaged head on his mother’s breast. He ignored them and went to the top drawer of the dresser, pulled out a sock in which he kept all his money (by now a mere four one-dollar bills), pulled out one of the remaining notes, rolled the sock back up, shoved it back in the drawer, and slammed it shut so hard that the framed picture of Wilma’s mother fell onto the floor. Wilma heard the glass shatter and squeezed her eyes tightly shut, praying that the shards hadn’t cut into the only picture she had left of her mother, who had now been gone for about ten years.

Ezra Hodges, not being able to cope with the terrible fact that he’d assaulted his son, quickly walked out to “The Watering Hole” to wait until its doors opened a few hours later. It was better for him to be there than to see what he had done to his family.

That night Ezra came home drunk as always. It was 2:30 a.m., and Jonas and Wilma were both sleeping on Jonas’s floor mat. Ezra stumbled past the fireplace and, seeing that his bed was empty, immediately erupted in anger. “WHERE DAT WOMAN BE AT?,” he screamed. “SHE BEDDIN’ WIT’ SOMEBODY ELSE? I’M GONNA KILL HIM GOOD!”

Wilma and Jonas were both awakened by Ezra’s ranting and quickly embraced each other tightly. They heard him scurrying around the apartment from one end to the other and then heard a clanking sound, much like that of silverware when you dig through it to find a necessary untensil.

Suddenly it grew silent. Wilma kissed her son’s forehead gently, making Jonas flinch because his whole head was still sore. She whispered a faint “Sorry” in his ear and kissed his earlobe instead. She then got up, no longer half asleep. Her heart pounding forcefully in her chest, she called to her husband, “I in here wit’ Jonas, Ezra. I be right there.”

Ezra burst through the curtain just before Wilma reached it herself. This time Ezra held the metal poker he had taken from the fireplace, its tip red-hot. In a drunken rage he shouted, “THIS BE WHO YOU BEDDIN’ WIT’? OUR OWN SON YOU SLEEPIN’ WITH, YOU HOE!”

Once again wanting to protect his mother, Jonas jumped up and cried, “NO! MAMMA!” just as his father came after her with the hot poker. As he pushed Wilma out of the way, a brave Jonas knocked into his father, who in turn dropped the poker. Wilma fell to the ground, with Jonas collapsing on top of her. The boy’s head was now throbbing worse than before, and he felt the thick cut in his scalp reopen.

Completely inebriated, Ezra saw his son atop Wilma on the floor. “SO YOU WANNA FUCK YO’ MAMMA IN FRONNA ME LIKE YOU DA BIG MAN NOW?” said Ezra, still shouting but with a tone of matter-of-factness in his voice. He bent down, grabbed Jonas by the back of his collar, brought his mouth to his son’s ear, and bit the top portion of cartilage completely off. Jonas shrieked in agony as his father threw him back on top of Wilma. Ezra’s mouth dripped with blood. He faced Wilma and spit the cartilage at her. It landed on her face. She flinched in disgust as the piece of ear fell onto the floor.

Jonas lay on the floor screaming so loudly that Ezra found it necessary to cover his ears. He even began to join in with Jonas, screaming and yelling, which made Wilma whimper as she lay on the floor. With Jonas’s head resting on her belly, she contorted her head until she was able to see his ear. Blood was gushing out.

“Ezra!” she pleaded. “He gonna bleed to death! Please, I beggin’ you! Help him!”

Ezra stopped yelling as he noticed his son’s ear. He remembered the poker, still red-hot at the tip. He picked it up slowly, methodically, and knelt down next to Jonas and Wilma. Jonas was too afraid to move after the cruelty his father had just inflicted on him. He cried and trembled uncontrollably, clutching the hem of his mother’s robe with both his hands.

Knowing exactly what her husband was planning to do, Wilma said calmly and deliberately, “Ezra, what you fixin’ to do wit’ dat poker?” Wilma would say later how she “saw right den an’ dere, da devil hisself in Ezra’s eyes.”

Ezra replied softly, “I remember my granddaddy done tol’ me once when he be a boy on da plantation. One slave done loss hisself a leg, an’ dey had ta burn da woun’ to stop da bleedin’.”