The Twelve Tribes of Hattie (12 page)

The house was quiet. The children were probably crying in their beds—if they had gone to bed. August couldn’t muster the courage to go upstairs and check on them. What if they were still awake? It would be equally terrible if they were in bed with dirty faces and their pajamas buttoned wrong, things that wouldn’t happen if Hattie were there.

She’ll be on the road now, August thought.
They’ll
be on the road. She said they were going to Baltimore. That man Lawrence had some people there. Hattie intended to send for the children as soon as she got herself settled. August cursed her when she said that. He said he’d set the house on fire before he’d let even one of his children go and live with her and some no account nigger.

A tune came to his mind, a little jingle Cassie used to play on the piano at Marion’s house years ago. She told him it was Russian. These girls knew all kinds of things he and Hattie had never heard of. Bell was always reading something. She left her schoolbooks in the living room sometimes, and late at night when August came home from a nightclub or a woman, he would read them. He came across a poem he liked so much that he read it night after night:
This is the hour of lead / Remembered if outlived.
He couldn’t recall the title or any more than that one line. It seemed to him that he could never get a proper grip on any of the beauty in this world.

He lit a fresh cigarette from the butt of the one he’d just smoked. Floyd hadn’t returned. He probably hadn’t even gone to Marion’s. Just as well, August thought, she would have come over here acting like I was something stuck to the bottom of her shoe.

Fool woman, and stingy. She should have given him and Hattie the piano—nobody knew how to play it besides Cassie; since she stopped going over there to practice, it was just collecting dust. Cassie had a gift with that piano. August went to Marion’s to pick her up after school one day and damned if Cassie wasn’t trying to pick out “Take The ‘A’ Train.” She said she heard it on the radio—ain’t that something! It wasn’t long after that Hattie said she couldn’t take lessons anymore even though the woman around the corner thought Cassie was so good she taught her for free. Hattie said it wasn’t practical for a Negro girl to fill her head with music. “What’s she going to do with that?” she said.

There was no call to mash up the child’s dreams that way. So what if it wasn’t practical? Cassie was only twelve at the time. Look at all this trouble August had gone through to live up here in Philadelphia and have a better life. At the very least, a better life ought to mean a child could have something that didn’t have any purpose except to make her smile. He told Hattie to let her be. Hattie said she didn’t think nights at the juke and good taste in suit jackets qualified August to make decisions about her children.

August tiptoed into the house and got the holiday cordial from the credenza. He stood in the dining room swigging from the bottle and listening for signs that any of the children were still awake. If they had gone to bed, it wasn’t because he’d told them to but because they were too scared and confused to do anything else. Whenever he told them to do anything, they looked at Hattie to see if they had to obey him. They treated him like a jokester uncle who came around to play with them but was of no real consequence. He went out at night, sure, but why shouldn’t he? He worked, when he could, and he always gave Hattie half of what he earned, or thereabouts. Lots of men August knew had a private life outside of the home. Hell, August knew men that had women and children they never saw and didn’t intend on seeing.

Before August and Hattie got married, his friends warned him that a high yellow woman like her wouldn’t do anything but step on his neck. Lord, she was pretty. She wasn’t more than sixteen when they started courting but she was already a lady. Half of the time she looked at him like he had crawled out of a swamp. She only liked him because she thought he was beneath her and it thrilled her to go out with a poor country-boy type. If he’d had a mandolin and a piece of hay between his teeth, she’d have fallen in love with him on the spot. That mama of hers was a different story. She would have cut him down like the cedars of Lebanon if she could have. She didn’t let Hattie and her sisters do anything. Hattie was restless. Even when she was sitting still, her foot tapped or her fingers thrummed the arm of the chair. When she and August managed to get away from her mama and go walking, her eyes were never steady on him for more than a few seconds. She was always looking off down the street for something. He gave her a red scarf, but she couldn’t take it in the house, so she put it in a box and hid it under the porch. She loved that scarf; she said it was so soft against her cheek, it reminded her of the breeze on her face on the first day of spring. Funny that she used to be fanciful like that. Of course, the rest of the time she was so prim and proper she’d hardly let herself laugh. Still, she fascinated him, and he got her to like him a little. One night he took her to his brother’s house, where she had done with him what other girls did. After his conquest, the thrill wore off for both of them. Hattie didn’t mind too much when he stopped coming around as often.

Hattie told August by letter that she was in trouble. He hadn’t seen her in weeks, but as soon as he read that letter, he went running to her door. He was seventeen. He didn’t know what he wanted to do with his life because none of the options were any good. When Hattie said she was pregnant, August decided then and there that he wanted to be a family man. He would become an electrician and marry Hattie, who was, after all, one of the prettiest girls in Germantown. She would loosen up when she got away from her mama. They would sit on their porch on summer nights drinking buttermilk and looking at the stars. It would be an all right life. So he went over to Hattie’s and spoke to her mama, who already knew, he imagined, because she looked at him like she wanted to put an ice pick through his chest. On his way out of the house he heard her tell Hattie that she had ruined her life. I ain’t nobody’s ruin, he thought. Now here they were twenty-five years later, and maybe he had ruined Hattie’s life, or she’d ruined his. He wondered if she would have stayed with him if her mama hadn’t died a few months before the babies were born. Women did that, got sick of their husbands and went back to their mamas. Could be Hattie was still with him because she didn’t have anywhere to go.

But it was Hattie’s own fault she was so unhappy. How could she expect him not to step out a little when she was always so mad? He didn’t understand her. Some nights she lay curled on her side like a fist, and other nights they were on each other until dawn—she scratched his back and bit his shoulders, and they buried their faces in the pillows so the children wouldn’t hear. But the days were always the same, she didn’t return his smiles, shrugged him off when he tried to touch her. She would fuck him—that’s all he could think to call it—but she didn’t have any tenderness for him. Didn’t she know August was heartbroken—too? He’d never get over Philadelphia and Jubilee either. Or that Six had been burned half to death, and it twisted his head up so bad that Six beat that boy half to death. When August was a young man, he hadn’t known what he wanted for his children’s lives, but it surely wasn’t this. There wasn’t anything to do but make the best of it, and that’s what August tried to do. What’s that old saying: make hay while the sun shines? Hattie put all the blame on August. She never for one minute stopped thinking he was the cause of every bad thing that ever was, and he had never stopped hoping that one morning he would wake up and prove her wrong. If she would stop hating him for one day, one hour, he’d have the strength to do the right thing by her. This was the life they had. Nobody could ever know it like they did. They owed it to each other to stay together. That was their bond.

The front door creaked open and closed again. “Hattie?” August rushed into the living room.

Bell stood by the stairs.

“What was you doing outside at this hour?” August asked.

“I took a walk.”

“It’s going for midnight!”

She looked down at her feet. August knew he ought to put the bottle of cordial away. He ought to ask her if she’d seen him and Hattie fighting and find a way to make her feel better.

“You go on up there to bed,” he said, walking back to the dining room. “This ain’t no hour for little girls.” Bell followed him.

“Can I sit down here with you for a little while?” she asked.

“I think you need to get some rest.”

“I don’t think Mother’s coming back.”

August sat heavily in one of the chairs.

“Ain’t no telling.”

“She’s not.”

“Why you say that?”

“I just know,” Bell said. “I saw them.”

“You saw who?”

“Mother and that man.”

“Where you see them?”

“On the street.”

“Today?”

Bell shook her head. August could feel the liquor working in him.

“Well, hell, maybe she ain’t coming back.”

Bell began to cry. August thought to whistle a tune or say something to make her laugh. But what was the point?

“Let’s us just set down here and have a good cry. Ain’t much else to do.”

Bell sat next to her father, put her head in his lap, and wept. He lit a cigarette and stroked her cheek while he smoked. She had a mosquito bite that he worried with his index finger until she squirmed and told him to stop. Bell fell asleep.

“We in trouble for good now,” he whispered to his daughter’s sleeping body.

THEY WERE ONLY
a few miles from Baltimore. Hattie hadn’t said a word in the hour since the state trooper had passed. She held Ruthie across her lap so the baby’s head rested in the crook of her elbow. She rocked her even after she had quieted and fallen asleep. Lawrence couldn’t see any affection in the way Hattie dandled their daughter—it was as though she were stirring a pot of soup. How many children could a woman really love? Lawrence was one of fifteen, and it had always seemed to him that his mother regarded him as another mouth, another stomach, another pair of feet outgrowing their shoes. Lawrence shrugged his shoulders as he drove. What else could she have done? They were too many. Ruthie is one of Hattie’s many, he thought. Who would she grow up to be among all of those children?

Look how Hattie was holding her—as if Ruthie were just anybody, just any baby that needed holding. What if, he thought, Hattie couldn’t love any more children? Maybe we only have a finite amount of love to give. We’re born with our portion, and if we love and are not loved enough in return, it’s depleted. Lawrence had not loved enough. He had refused to use his allotment, and now it was spilling over, pressing at the borders of him. He might burst with it; he might pop like a balloon.

“We’re almost there,” Lawrence said.

So what if he only had a couple of dollars in his pocket. He’d collect on a debt as soon as they got to town, and that would take care of them until his next game. He’d rent them a house inside of a week. Less than a week, Lawrence thought.

To Hattie he said, “We’ll go down to Philly on the Pennsy and pick them up. I bet the little ones haven’t even been on a train before. We’ll have a house with a big yard, maybe a swing. You wouldn’t believe the porches—”.

“Would you stop! Please just stop talking for one minute! I can’t stand it!”

“How about you start talking, Hattie? How about you stop sitting there like an icicle and act for one goddamn minute like you’re glad to be here with me!”

He had not intended to raise his voice, but she was so … did she not understand the sacrifice he was making? Surely if she wanted to, she could offer him a smile, some kind of encouragement.

Hattie took a deep breath. “When I was a little girl, my father took us to see some of his people near Savannah,” she said. “We went to a little bitty strip of rocky beach they had for Negroes. Mama wouldn’t let us swim, but she went off to do something, and I lifted up my skirt and ran into the water.”

Hattie cupped Ruthie’s dimpled knee with her palm.

“My cousin Coleman came up behind me and splashed water all over my dress. He knew how to swim, so he went off doing tricks. He floated on his back and spit the water straight up like a fountain, and he dove down so all I could see were his legs poking out of the water like little brown sticks. Then he was floating with his arms out to his sides and his head bobbing just above the surface. I was so delighted! It was like he was pressing on the water to heave himself up and then he’d disappear again. He kept doing that and it was so funny, but then he went under and didn’t come up anymore. I stood in the shallow part waiting for him to pop up and make crab claws at me, but he never did. All of a sudden everybody was screaming and running. I looked back at the shore, and Mama was holding Coleman’s mother so she wouldn’t go in after him. I came out and stood on the beach. A while later a man came out of the water carrying Coleman, and I knew he was drowned.”

“Drowning doesn’t look how you think it would. Do you understand what I’m saying to you?” Hattie looked over at Lawrence. “I told you this morning. I said I couldn’t be a fool twice. ”

“Nobody’s drowning, Hattie. I’m here helping you.”

“Helping me? It isn’t help I need, Lawrence. It’s a safe port in a storm.”

Lawrence had lived his life attending to the immediate, the basic things necessary to his survival—food, shelter, money. Hattie was incomprehensible. There was always a drowning or a port or some big thing that couldn’t be fixed and shouldn’t even be thought about. It was now that mattered—this car, this highway, getting to Baltimore. He had always thought her discontent was sort of pretty, like a sad song, but maybe she was just dark and heavy. Too much for him. How was he to take care of a woman like that, who couldn’t be taken care of because she was always thinking about the whys of things. But he was not a man to further complicate a complicated situation. He hadn’t gotten this far by poking his nose into dark corners. Better to smooth and ease and talk his way through it.