pregnant.
Two nights later Johnny and two friends tried to stick up a liquor store on lower 49th Street. The proprietor
had a shotgun under the counter. He brought it out. Johnny Rosewall was packing a nickel-plated .32, a
hockshop special. He pointed it at the proprietor, pulled the trigger, and the pistol blew up. One of the
fragments of the barrel entered Johnny Rosewall’s brain through his right eye and killed him instantly.
What Delores knew of Martha’s past came down to this: her friend was well-shut of a bad man. She had
worked on at Le Palais until her seventh month; she had gotten an assurance from Mrs Proulx, then head of
housekeeping, that she could have her old job back later on if she still wanted it; she had borne a seven-pound
boy whom she had named Peter; and Peter had, in the fullness of time, written a novel called Blaze of Glory
which everyone – including the Book-of-the-Month Club and Universal Pictures – thought destined for the
bestseller lists.
All this she had heard, but Delores did not hear about Mama Delorme or Peter Jeffries, the man Martha
called her Peter’s “natural father,” until that afternoon in Le Cinq, with glasses of champagne before them and the advance copy of Pete’s novel in the plain blue canvas tote by Martha’s feet.
5
“We were living in Harlem, of course,” Martha said to Delores. She was looking down at her champagne
glass, twirling it between her fingers. “On Stanton Street, which crosses 119th up by Station Park. I’ve been
back since. It’s worse than it was – a lot worse – but it was no beauty spot even then, in 1959.
“There was a woman who lived at the Station Park end of Stanton Street, everyone just called her Mama
Delorme, and everyone swore she was a bruja woman. I didn’t believe in anything like that myself, and once
I asked ‘Tavia Kinsolving, who lived in the same building as me and Johnny, how people could go on
believing such trash in a day when space satellites went whizzing around the earth and there was a cure for
just about every disease under the sun. She was an educated woman – had been to Julliard – and was only
living in Harlem because she had her mother and three younger brothers to support. I thought she would agree
with me but she only laughed and shook her head.
” ‘Are you telling me you believe in bruja?’ I asked her.
“No, I don’t believe in bruja,” she said, “but I believe in her, Martha. She is different. Maybe for every thousand – or ten thousand – or million – women who claim to be witchy, there’s one who really is. If so,
Mama Delorme is that woman.”‘
“I just laughed. People who don’t need bruja can afford to laugh at it, I reckon, the same way that people who
don’t need prayer can afford to laugh at that. In those days I still thought I could straighten’ Johnny out, and
make a man of him – if you can dig that.”
Delores nodded. She could dig it.
“Then I had the miscarriage. Johnny was the main reason I had it, I guess, although I didn’t like to admit that
even to myself back then. He was beating on me all the time, and drinking all the time. He’d take the money I
gave him and then he’d take more out of my purse. When I told him I wanted him to quit hooking from my
bag he’d get all woundy-faced and claim he hadn’t done any such thing. That was if he was sober. If he was
drunk he’d just laugh.
“I wrote my momma down in Babylon – it hurt me to write that letter, and it shamed me, and I cried ‘most all
the time I was writing it – but I had to know what she thought. She wrote back and told me to get out of it, to
go right away before he put me in the hospital or even worse. My older sister, Kissy, went that one better – she
sent me a Greyhound bus ticket with two words written on the envelope in pink Crayon – GO NOW,”