‘What did you do?’
‘Well, there was a chair with a saggy old cane seat near the door and I guess that was lucky for me, because when she said what she did, the world kind of grayed over and my knees came unbolted. I was going to sit down no matter what, but if the chair hadn’t been there I would have sat on the floor.
‘She just waited for me to get myself back together and went on knitting. It was like she had seen it all a hundred times before. I suppose she had.
‘When my heart finally began to slow down I opened my mouth and what came out was “I’m going to leave my husband.”
‘ “No,” she came back right away, “he gonna leave you. You gonna see him out, is all. Stick around, woman. There be a little money. You gonna think he hoit the baby but he dint be doin it.’
‘ “How,” I said, but that was all I could say, it seemed like, and so I kept saying it over and over. “How-how-how,” just like John Lee Hooker on some old blues record. Even now, twenty-six years later, I can smell those old burned candles and kerosene from the kitchen and the sour smell of dried wallpaper, like old cheese. I can see her, small and frail in this old blue dress with little polka-dots that used to be white but had gone the yellowy color of old newspapers by the time I met her. She was so little, but there was such a feeling of power that came from her, like a bright, bright light — ‘
Martha got up, went to the bar, spoke with Ray, and came back with a large glass of water.
She drained most of it at a draught.
‘Better?’ Darcy asked.
‘A little, yeah.’ Martha shrugged, then smiled. ‘It doesn’t do to go on about it, I guess. If you’d been there, you’d’ve felt it. You’d’ve felt her.
‘ “How I do anythin or why you married that country piece of shit in the first place ain’t neither of them important now,” Mama Delorme said to me. “What’s important now is you got to find the child’s natural father.”
‘Anyone listening would have thought she was as much as saying I’d been screwing around on my man, but it never even occurred to me to be mad at her; I was too confused to be mad. “What do you mean?” I asked. ” Johnny’s the child’s natural father.”
‘She kind of snorted and flapped her hand at me, like she was saying Pshaw. “Ain’t nothin natural about that man.”
Then she leaned in closer to me and I started to feel a little scared. There was so much knowing in her, and it felt like not very much of it was nice.
‘ ”Any child a woman get, the man shoot it out’n his pecker, girl,” she said. “You know that, don’t you?”
‘I didn’t think that was the way they put it in the medical books, but I felt my head going up n down just the same, as if she’d reached across the room with hands I couldn’t see and nodded it for me.
‘ “That’s right,” she said, nodding her ownself. “That’s the way God planned it to be . . . like a seesaw. A man shoots cheerun out’n his pecker, so them cheerun mostly his. But it’s a woman who carries em and bears em and has the raisin of em, so them cheerun mostly hers. That’s the way of the world, but there’s a ‘ception to every rule, one that proves the rule, and this is one of em. The man who put you with child ain’t gonna be no natural father to that child — he wouldn’t be no natural father to it even if he was gonna be around. He’d hate it, beat it to death before its foist birthday, rnos’ likely, because he’d know it wasn’t his. A man can’t always smell that out, or see it, but he will if the child is different enough . . . and this child goan be as different from piss-ignorant Johnny Rosewall as day is from night. So tell me, girl: who is the child’s natural father?”
And she kind of leaned toward me.
‘All I could do was shake my head and tell her I didn’t know what she was talking about. But I think that something in me — something way back in that part of your mind that only gets a real chance to think in your dreams — did know. Maybe I’m only making that up because of all I know now, but I don’t think so. I think that for just a moment or two his name fluttered there in my head.
‘I said, “I don’t know what it is you want me to say — I don’t know anything about natural fathers or unnatural ones. I don’t even know for sure if I’m pregnant, but if I am it has to be Johnny’s, because he’s the only man I’ve ever slept with!”
‘Well, she sat back for a minute, and then she smiled. Her smile was like sunshine, and it eased me a little. “I didn’t mean to scare you, honey,” she said. “That wasn’t none of what I had in my mind at all. It’s just that I got the sight, and sometime it’s strong. I’ll just brew us a cup of tea, and that’ll calm you down. You’ll like it. It’s special to me.”
‘I wanted to tell her I didn’t want any tea, but it seemed like I couldn’t. Seemed like too much of an effort to open my mouth, and all the strength had gone out of my legs.
‘She had a greasy little kitchenette that was almost as dark as a cave. I sat in the chair by the door and watched her spoon loose tea into an old chipped china pot and put a kettle on the gas ring. I sat there thinking I didn’t want anything that was special to her, nor anything that came out of that greasy little kitchenette either. I was thinking I’d take just a little sip to be mannerly and then get my ass out of there as fast as I could and never come back.
‘But then she brought over two little china cups just as clean as snow and a tray with sugar and cream and fresh-baked bread-rolls. She poured the tea and it smelled good and hot and strong. It kind of waked me up and before I knew it I’d drunk two cups and eaten one of the bread-rolls, too.
‘She drank a cup and ate a roll and we got talking along on more natural subjects — who we knew on the street, whereabouts in Alabama I came from, where I liked to shop, and all that.
Then I looked at my watch and seen over an hour and a half had gone by. I started to get up and a dizzy feeling ran through me and I plopped right back in my chair again.’
Darcy was looking at her, eyes round.
‘ “You doped me,” I said, and I was scared, but the scared part of me was way down inside.
‘ “Girl, I want to help you,” she said, “but you don’t want to give up what I need to know and I know damn well you ain’t gonna do what you need to do even once you do give it up — not without a push. So I fixed her. You gonna take a little nap, is all, but before you do you’re gonna tell me the name of your babe’s natural father.”
‘And, sitting there in that chair with its saggy cane bottom and hearing all of uptown roaring and racketing just outside her living-room window, I saw him as clear as I’m seeing you now, Darcy. His name was Peter Jefferies, and he was just as white as I am black, just as tall as I am
short, just as educated as I am ignorant. We were as different as two people could be except for one thing — we both come from Alabama, me from Babylon down in the toolies by the Florida state line, him from Birmingham. He didn’t even know I was alive — I was just the nigger woman who cleaned the suite where he always stayed on the eleventh floor of this hotel. And as for me, I only thought of him to stay out of his way because I’d heard him talk and seen him operate and I knew well enough what sort of man he was. It wasn’t just that he wouldn’t use a glass a black person had used before him without it had been washed; I’ve seen too much of that in my time to get worked up about it. It was that once you got past a certain point in that man’s character, white and black didn’t have anything to do with what he was. He belonged to the sonof-a-bitch tribe, and that particular bunch comes in all skin-colors.