River, cross my heart (8 page)

Clara the rat hightailed it down Dumbarton Avenue, run-ning scared one day. One day! Every other day, just about. Old fraidy cat! It didn't take much to get Clara wailing and hightailing it down the street. Of course, she was a little girl and her feelings got hurt real easy.

Her feelings got hurt pretty bad one day by the big old

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rawboned girl called Bessie Daley. Bessie was a lobster-red white girl whose mother and father got drunk every Saturday at dusk and stayed pie-eyed and belligerent until Monday morning. Bessie's father was a general laborer who mostly cleaned furnaces at the white churches and up at Georgetown University. Most of the time you saw him, his lobster-red face was half covered with soot. Bessie's mother spent most of her day lounging on a sofa in her front room. She was a daylong drinker, and neither her clothes, her hair, nor her home was ever quite clean.

This was what got Johnnie Mae mad—this betrayal. She charged down O Street in a rage of indignation with Clara following behind, still bawling. Who did that big, old dumb-looking gal think she was, calling Clara out of her name? Bessie, who pretended to be a friend to everybody, called Clara a dirty little nigger in front of her cousins from out of town. She had always petted Clara and talked silly to her and had given her penny candy from time to time. She had made a point of seeking out the Bynum girls for friendship because she wasn't too popular among her own. This fact wasn't lost on the girls, especially on Johnnie Mae. And Johnnie Mae wanted to shake Clara and set her head bobbing because she couldn't stand up for herself or stop herself from crying. But she knew what her duty was. It was plain: She'd have to whip the daylights out of Bessie Daley.

Johnnie Mae landed a solid punch up beside Bessie Daley's broad nose and knocked her on her tailbone before two words had passed between them. In fact, the punch was prefaced by only two words, delivered with a big voice full oi threat and vow: "Bessie Daley!" The punch caused Bessie to wail and carry on and started a stream of blood and mucus coursing out

of her nose. Bessie and any others who had it in mind to pick on Clara learned a lesson that day- Johnnie Mae could take care of herself and Clara, too.

The first day Johnnie Mae came back around to Ann-Martha's to deliver bundles of laundry after Clara died, the woman looked her in the eyes with the plain, unequivocal look of a bull. "You push her? Did you?" Ann-Martha asked.

This was the question that nobody else had asked. Not even Johnnie Mae's parents had asked her this. But Ann-Martha came right out with it and in so doing gave Johnnie Mae the first chance to say out loud, "No! No, Miss Ann-Martha, I didn't push her."

Johnnie Mae was going to go on and say that she really loved Clara despite how she may have treated her sometimes. But Ann-Martha raised her hand sharply like a traffic cop and said, "That's all I want to know. That's all." They fell into their work and didn't speak about Clara again.

Four large galvanized tin tubs were arranged in a row on Ann-Martha's kitchen floor. There was a tub for soaking clothes, a tub for clothes being scrubbed, a tub for rinsing, and a tub of soaking baby diapers. Ann-Martha did three, sometimes four separate washes a day and insisted that delicates and coarse goods, bedding and colored items could not be washed or rinsed together. Baby diapers also received a special handling. Ann-Martha was particular about how the washes were done, a fact that was belied by the slovenly look about her person and her house.

The wood stove roared under several large pots of boiling

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water. A dwindling pile oi wood was near the back door next to an empty bin tor coal and a half-tilled one for newspapers. Outside oi the effort she put into actually washing clothes, Ann-Martha had to expend considerable in keeping her stove alive, too.

Little for food preparation was visible in her kitchen. There were only two coffee cups, one spoon, a tin oi sugar, a tin oi Luzianne coffee, and a coffeepot. An opened box of Argo starch was on the kitchen table, and flecks of white clung to the side of Ann-Martha's face.

Ann-Martha worked quickly, pinching open her clothespins and arranging sheets neatly on the lines, overlapping their corners. The effort caused her to huff and snort like a locomotive. Oddly, Ann-Martha was always anxious about the clothespins she carried in a large pocket in her apron. From this pocket, which created an additional layer to her wide midriff, she transferred each clothespin to her mouth and then to her fingers. Each one reversed this track back to her apron when clothes were removed from the lines. She hardly ever left one on the table or anywhere about the premises.

Johnnie Mae stood and waited for Ann-Martha to finish assembling clean bundles. She placed herself near the end of the table closest to the door and rested her fingers against its edge. She knew better than to drum her fingers on Ann-Martha's table, and she knew better than to sit down in the woman's presence unless invited to. Johnnie Mae had been taught that it was not proper for a girl to show impatience or to be too womanish.

All the washing was Ann-Martha's province. She had made that plain from early on in their relationship. As she

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spat snuff juice into a tin can near her feet, Ann-Martha had let slide from under her lips, "I know what dirts to look for. A young girl like you won't know what-all to be looking for. You had your monthly yet?"

Johnnie Mae had felt warmth creep into her face and looked down at her feet. "No, ma'am," she said. Not wanting to be thought a mere child and wanting credit for everything she did know, even allowing that she had much to learn, she said, "I know about that thing. I know what to look for."

Ann-Martha had chuckled, recognizing the girl's pluck. "Once you've had your first monthly you have to be careful of the mens. Don't let them come up on you or you'll get a belly. And for God's sake, don't let 'em come behind you. Don't let them in there or you'll get a big butt. Where you think all these big-butt women got theirs? Steer clear of mens. Keep your back to the wall." Ann-Martha roared with laughter at the end of this "talk," and Johnnie Mae narrowed her eyes at the woman to make it clear she didn't believe a word of this but was too well brought up to answer back. She knew a girl was officially considered a woman after she'd had her first monthly. And she knew you could get "in trouble" if you let a man have at you after this point. But everybody knew that the surest way to get a big butt was to have a fondness for buttered biscuits and jam.

On Wednesdays, the delivery route started at the Alban Towers Hotel up on Wisconsin Avenue. The wagon was loaded down with a large pile of sheets for the hotel and starched shirts for Mr. Wainwright and Mr. Percy, bachelor men who lived at Alban Towers. Johnnie Mae had to be careful not to tip over the wagon under the top-heavy load. If the

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hotel's sheets arrived soiled, the hawk-raced woman who was the head housekeeper wouldn't take them and wouldn't pay.

Mr. Wainwright was always courtly. He howed as he took his bundle oi shirts and howed again as he handed her his knot of dirty shirts and his payment. Mr. Percy scowled at Johnnie Mae's intrusion and pushed his soiled shirts toward her with his foot. It was Mr. Percy's habit to place his pay-ment on the edge of the carpet in the hallway and quickly close his door before Johnnie Mae had bent to pick up the coins.

The hotel's sheets returning to Ann-Martha were a large, smelly bundle that took up most of the wagon. Care had to be taken with the dirty bundles, too. Ann-Martha would be salty if they arrived with extra dirt from the street.

On the second trip, neatly folded, sweet-smelling baby diapers were delivered to five households on Dumbarton Avenue. Ann-Martha had drilled Johnnie Mae to deliver the clean diapers as she headed west along Dumbarton and to pick up the dirty ones as she came back east toward Wisconsin Avenue. That way, clean diapers would not ride next to the soiled ones returning to be boiled and stirred.

The fragrance of the returning pile was ripe. As Johnnie Mae wound her way back to Ann-Martha's, she thought about Clara's reaction to the stink of the sheets and diapers in the summer. Johnnie Mae giggled. Clara had often made faces and threatened to puke as they pulled the stinking piles back to Ann-Martha's.

There was rest °ct between Johnnie Mae and Ann-Martha as concerned the money. The girl had enough moxie to ask for the payments from customers and was smart and honest

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enough to bring it all back. From what Ann-Martha could see, there wasn't much foolishness about the girl, and her shoe-button eyes were level when the time came for getting paid. She would not be shorted by accident or design.

Ann-Martha counted out Johnnie Mae's pay and grunted, "Tomorrow," to end their commerce. Johnnie Mae knew it was her place then to say, "Yes, ma'am," and leave.

The streets of Georgetown were the prettiest streets of any in Washington city, maybe the prettiest streets anywhere! Johnnie Mae was convinced of this though she had nothing to compare them to. All she remembered of her hometown in North Carolina was all that there was to it: a collection oi ramshackle buildings connected by a dirt track. But Georgetown—pretty trees, pretty houses! These must be the loveliest, most graceful thoroughfares of any place in the world. And loveliest of all being when the Fontarellis made their rounds lighting all of Georgetown's gas street lamps.

Clara used to say that she thought the Fontarellis had the responsibility for all the lights in the world. But what they actually had was the concession for Georgetown. The beefy, dark-haired sons and grandsons of Angelo Fontarelli turned on the streetlights at dusk and turned them off at dawn throughout Georgetown. The Fontarellis hired a few colored boys to work for them in Bell's Court and Poplar Alley, but they jealously guarded the rest of their concession. Street by street, lamp by lamp, the big-thighed Fontarellis hooked the pull chains on the gas lamps with long poles. When a pilot was out, they shimmied up like monkeys onto the narrow platforms on the lamps and relit the pilots with a match. Lamplighting time was the signal for the small children to go

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inside from play, and groups of children on every block would dance along ahead of the Fontarellis to steal a few more minutes outside.

The occupants of the big fancy houses with elegant gas porch lamps on their porticoes would call to one of the roving colored boys at dusk and toss him a penny to light their lamps.

Johnnie Mae had seen Washington's streets and they were nowhere near as pretty as Georgetown's. Maybe it was the people. The people of Georgetown were a prettier-looking bunch, she thought. On her way home from Ann-Martha's, Johnnie Mae stopped in front of a large picture window on R Street to gaze at a woman playing a grand piano. She watched and listened. The music floated out the window and filled the street. The woman's body seemed to rise out of the piano bench like a sapling.

Johnnie Mae stepped forward to get a closer look at the woman's hands. She had once chuckled conspiratorially with Papa as he teased Mama about her hands. "You got hands like a white woman, Alice, all soft and smallish. You must don't do any kind of work. You must be sittin' down on your biscuits rockin' and fannin' all day."

Mama laughed. "You ought to take a look at my feet. You'll lose ten years off your life at the sight of them. As little sitting as I do between work and home, my biscuits never touch a seat."

Papa's look shifted when she said this. His eyes rolled away from Johnnie Mae and the conspiracy shifted. Mama's eyes likewise rolled backward over her left shoulder. Johnnie Mae saw these looks pass and dropped her gaze to the floor. "I got feathers for you," Papa said in a quiet voice.

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What did a white woman's hands look like? Sorting through grown people's conversation and pulling together nuance, innuendo, and gossip, a picture emerged in Johnnie Mae's mind of something to put yourself up against, something small, white, and lissome. From where she stood on the sidewalk, the skin on the woman's hands looked like the small porcelain bisque figurines on Alexis St. Pierre's mantel.

Folks always say, "You come in this world alone, and you must leave it alone." They ought to know better. Because it isn't so. It's not that way at all. The child comes to life very much attached and stays attached and is mired all its life in a soup of relations. This child struggles to be born. It comes out pushing and pulling with the cord attached and still holding on way up. The child has to pull and push and make a place for itself in and among all the people that are already here.

When they pulled Clara's body out of the Potomac it didn't look at all like the corpses Willie had seen, except that it was unmoving. The skin was mottled, not smooth and sweet like Little Mama's or even shrunken away and sagging like Big Mama's.

Willie's pet name for Clara was Little Mama, denoting a thing in her nature that was small, birdlike, and vulnerable. Clara was Willie's second Little Mama. His first Little Mama had raised Willie. She was his sister, Merle, two years older than him, who died of cholera in the year oi the big epidemic.

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From the beginning, Willie had felt a quality of awe in Clara's presence because she was so much like Merle. Well before she'd got of an age to favor anyone, he knew she was Merle come again. There was a quality to her breath, a scent he'd smelled the first time he held her, that was like Merle's. He seldom talked oi these feelings with Alice, who was so protective of the child. Once he had said, "She's so like Little Mama, like Merle, like my sister." Alice had nodded and said, "Do you think so?"

Early in the marriage, Alice had been concerned about Willie's feelings for Merle. Someone told Alice the story of how Willie had been found the morning after Merle died with his head resting on her breast. Merle's white shift was crushed in his fist. Folks say it's not good for a person to rest their head on a dead person's chest. If you do you can never be free of them. They'll carry a bit o{ your spirit away with them. Of course, some folks so love their people that they want to be carried away with them and just as surely they put their head onto the dead's chest and pray to go along. That's what Willie had done. So devastated to be left again, he'd begged Merle to take him too. He got so mad with her still body that he punched her and twisted her shift in his hands. But Merle didn't move a muscle. Willie lay his head on her chest and fell to sleep. Drifting off, he was sure she stroked his brow and said, "Willie, Willie, Willie, Bab Bruh."