The Darkest Child Read online

  “You know better, Pearl!” Mama exploded when Miss Pearl went back into the bedroom. “She ain’t coming in my house. That shriveled up, rheumy-eyed, snuff-dipping ol’ bitch. I’d rather die a hundred deaths than let her touch me.”

  I glanced at Wallace, who grinned and shook his head. “They sleeping through all this,” he said, indicating Laura and Edna who were lying on the kitchen floor. “I don’t know how they can sleep through this.”

  “It’s nice somebody can,” I said. “I think I’ll curl up in this chair and try to get a little sleep myself. It could be a long night.”

  I nudged Martha Jean and pointed to the other chair. She stood and stretched, and while she was doing so, Tarabelle strode across the hall, brushed past her, and slumped down in the unoccupied chair.

  “Po’ Mama,” Tarabelle said in a voice void of sympathy. “She done had her whites, her Indians, and her coloreds.This one must be Chinese or something ’cause it sho’ don’t wanna be born in this house.”

  “What they doing in there?” Wallace asked.

  “Nothing, ”Tarabelle answered.“Ain’t nothing they can do.”

  Martha Jean knelt on the floor beside the stove, and I said, “Martha Jean is scared. She doesn’t understand what’s going on.”

  “You the one scared, ”Tarabelle snapped. “Martha Jean know all about it, a lot more than you. I tol’ her about having babies—how it tears yo’ insides out. How you bleed like a hog, and pieces of yo’ body come rolling out on the bed, all slimy and smelly.”

  I could feel her watching me, but I kept my eyes averted and said nothing.

  “Tan, I bet you don’t even know how a baby is made, do you?” she whispered, and did not wait for a reply. “Takes a man and a woman to do it. You take off yo’ clothes and let him pee inside you. That’s all there is to it.”

  It was too disgusting to be believable, but Wallace, intrigued by Tarabelle’s nonsense, stepped closer toward her. “Is that true, Tara?” he asked.

  She nodded.

  “It is not, Wallace,” I said. “She’s making that up.”

  “Takes days to get all that pee out yo’ body, ”Tarabelle continued, enjoying herself. “That is, unless you know how to wash it out. One day, Tan, I’m gon’ tell you how to wash it out. Sometimes you can’t get it all, and some of it gets in yo’ belly and mixes wit’ food and makes a baby.”

  I began to laugh. It was a high-pitched, humorless laugh, bordering on hysteria. My mother was a clean woman. Never would she allow a man to do the number one in her. Tarabelle should have known better than to say such a thing, and anyway, babies did not grow in bellies; they grew in wombs.

  My laughter brought Miss Pearl back into the front room. She stood over me and shook my shoulders. “Child, ain’t nothing funny here,” she scolded.

  I struggled to regain my composure, to become once more the calm, sensible Tangy that she knew so well, but each time I opened my mouth to explain, shrill laughter erupted. My jaws ached, and my stomach cramped. I was so consumed by laughter and tears that Miss Pearl stepped back and just allowed me to ride it out.

  At first, I could not identify the sharp pain in my left arm. I thought it was just another symptom of my hysteria, like the aching jaws and the cramping stomach. But as the pain intensified, I tried to move my arm and found that I could not. Tarabelle had a grip on me. She was pinching the skin above my elbow so hard that she had bitten down on her bottom lip.

  “Stop it, Tara! ”Wallace shouted. “You hurting her.”

  It was an understatement. Tarabelle probably would have ripped the skin away from the bone of my arm if Miss Pearl had not intervened.

  “That’s enough of that,” she said, gripping Tarabelle’s wrist. “Let her go!”

  Tarabelle gave one last, long twist before releasing my arm. “It’s all yo’ fault I gotta go clean somebody’s house. Ain’t no telling what you went out there and said to them Munfords wit’ yo’ uppity ass,” Tarabelle lashed out at me. “I do mo’ ’round here than anybody, now I gotta do even mo’. It ain’t fair.”

  In my opinion, Tarabelle did less than anybody in the house. She did not go to work or to school. She did not watch over Laura and Edna. She did not scrub the outhouse, dump the night bucket, lug the water bucket, chop wood, haul in coal or kindling, sweep or mop the floors, wash dishes, cook meals, clean the ice box, nor run errands. She helped wash clothes on Saturdays, and as far as I was concerned, that was all she did.

  I expected Miss Pearl to remind her of that, but Miss Pearl sat on the arm of Tarabelle’s chair, gave my sister a hug, and said, “It’s awright, chil’. Thangs got a way of working out. C’mon now, let’s go check on yo’ mama.”

  Okay. So maybe now Tarabelle could add delivering babies to her list of chores which consisted of washing clothes, hanging clothes, and letting the air take care of drying.

  Thus far, Miss Pearl had done all of the delivering in our house. From Mushy to Edna, she had delivered all of Mama’s babies, and had a long tale to tell about each birth. I had grown bored over the years of hearing how my mother did not trust the midwife or the hospital, and of how young and scared Miss Pearl had been when she had delivered Mushy.

  The springs in the seat of my chair cut into my bottom, but I did not want to move. I was angry, hurt, and scared. I lowered my head to the armrest and stared at Wallace, who stared back at me. Martha Jean stood and began shifting coals in the stove with the poker.

  That was the way Harvey and Sam found us when they returned with the midwife, Miss Zadie. She was indeed shriveled. She was a high-yellow colored woman who wore thick-lensed, brown-frame glasses. Her back was stooped to an angle so that she appeared to be searching for something on the floor, and when she held her head up, she resembled a turkey in the act of gobbling. Her bottom lip was unmistakably packed with snuff.

  Miss Pearl stepped out into the hallway, greeted the old woman, then rushed her into Mama’s room. I turned my attention back to the curtain. For the longest time there were only whispers and flickering light, but then Miss Pearl’s huge frame formed a silhouette against the sheet. She pushed the sheet aside.

  “Go get Frank!” she ordered. “Right now! Tell him to get the car out here as fast as he can.”

  “Mr. Grodin’s out front in his car,” Harvey said. “He brought us back wit’ Miss Zadie.”

  Miss Pearl nodded her head impatiently. “I know,” she said, “but he won’t take yo’ mama nowhere in his car. Go on and get Frank like I tol’ you.”

  “Look here, Miss Pearl,” Sam said. “I wanna know what’s going on in there.”

  “She bleeding awful bad, and we ain’t got no choice but to take her to the hospital. I think she done lost that chil’, and if you boys don’t get a move on, we might lose yo’ mama, too.”

  “Mr. Grodin can take her,” Sam insisted.

  “Yeah,” Harvey agreed. “Tan, you go on out there and tell Mr. Grodin we coming out wit’ Mama.”

  As Harvey and Sam stormed past Miss Pearl and into Mama’s room, I stayed in my sanctuary. I felt warm and secure in the chair, and I had no idea what the darkness outside held. What type of man would refuse to take a dying woman to the hospital? I did not know, but I was not going out alone to face him. Nothing made any sense. Mr. Grodin had brought his wife to our house to attend to Mama. Surely, that showed he was a kind and neighborly man. “You going, Tan? ”Wallace asked. “If you ain’t, I’m going.”

  “No, Wallace, don’t!” I said quickly. “If you warn him, he might drive off.”

  “He ain’t gon’ leave his wife.”

  “He might,” I said. “You don’t know.”

  Wallace thought about that for a second, then he snatched up the flashlight from the round table where Harvey had placed it, and started for the door. “I’m gon’ tell him,” he said. “If he drives off, I’ll just keep going till I get Mr. Frank or somebody else.”

  “I’ll go with you,” I said.

  We were stopped by the
old midwife before we even reached the door. “Ain’t no need to go out there,” she said. “John ain’t gon’ take her nowhere, and that’s all there is to it. No need troublin’ a ol’ man that’s set in his ways.”

  “Okay then,” Harvey conceded, stepping around Miss Zadie and taking the flashlight from Wallace’s hand. “I’m gon’ run on and get Mr. Frank.”

  “I’m gon’ wait right here,” Sam said. “If Mama gets any worse, I’ll make Mr. Grodin take her. If she dies, I’ll kill him.” To seal his threat, he walked into the front room, snatched the poker from Martha Jean, and glared at Miss Zadie.

  Harvey was well on his way before Miss Zadie chuckled and responded in an old woman’s patient voice. “He still wouldn’t take her,” she said.

  A knowing glance passed between the two midwives, something I did not understand, but that aroused my curiosity. They did not return to Mama’s room, but instead sat, like a fat woman and a dwarf, in the twin armchairs.

  Sam, Martha Jean, and I stood beside the stove with Wallace squatting at our feet, as our guest silently observed us. Miss Zadie, with her stubby little elbows braced on the armrests, fanned her hands and waggled her fingers. “So this is it?” she asked in a dry tone. “It ain’t fit for chickens.”

  “Now, Miss Zadie, don’t you go starting on nothing,” Miss Pearl warned. “These chilluns don’t know nothing ’bout you. This ain’t the time.”

  The old woman’s head inched upright on her neck with such an effort that I found myself straining my own neck in order to assist her. When she had it as far up as it would go, it bobbed unsteadily a few times, then settled. “When is the time?” she asked.

  Miss Pearl said nothing, and the old woman seemed not to expect an answer. She screwed her head around and stared at Wallace. “Come here, boy,” she said, as snuff oozed across her lip and rolled down her chin.

  “Nooooo!” Mama screamed, and I could hear Tarabelle in the next room trying to soothe her.

  Miss Pearl rose from her seat and padded back across the hall, and Wallace rose from his squat and stood watching Miss Zadie.

  “I said, come here, boy,” the midwife repeated, and when Wallace did not budge, she asked, “You scared of me or something?”

  “Ma’am,” Sam said, taking a step toward her, “we brought you out here to help our mother. If you can’t do that, I don’t see no sense in you wasting yo’ time or yo’ husband’s.”

  Miss Zadie grunted and wiggled into a standing position. With her back stooped and her head lowered, she made her way across the floor toward the four of us. She stopped in front of Martha Jean, went through the painstaking effort of lifting her head, then raised a vein-rippled hand and stroked my sister’s face.

  Martha Jean did not draw back, but I flinched enough for the both of us. Martha Jean drew a short line across her chest with a finger. “Name?” she signed, oblivious to the weakening moans coming from the bedroom.

  The midwife seemed not to hear them, either. She dropped her hand from Martha Jean’s face, surprise registering behind her thick lenses. “So, this is the deef one,” she said. “I heard Rozelle had a deef and dumb. Looks just like her mama, too, don’t she?”

  Sam stepped in front of Martha Jean, pushing her back slightly. “Miss Zadie, I don’t know you,” he said, “but I always heard you was a pretty decent midwife. Everybody say so. They say you delivered half the babies in Pakersfield. How is it you can’t help Mama?”

  She did not look at Sam. She took two awkward steps toward the stove as her tongue sank beneath her lower lip, and then, as if it were the most natural thing in the world, she spat a mixture of saliva and snuff right onto the belly of the stove. “Yo’ mama can’t be helped,” she said. “Ain’t nobody in the world can help yo’mama.”

  With that, she turned her back to us and left our house. The gob of snuff sizzled in her wake and became a permanent stain on the stove. For some reason, I felt it was a stain on me as well.

  That stain, scorching into the iron, held me captivated as Harvey and Sam carried our mother, moaning weakly, out to Mr. Frank’s car, which had finally arrived. And for the first time, I wondered if my mother could be helped, or if she were truly going to die.

  “One or the other, Lord,” I prayed aloud. “Help her or take her.”

  seven

  In the absence of our mother, gluttony threatened to be our downfall. Martha Jean, encouraged by Sam, cooked a huge pot of grits and fried over a dozen thick slices of bologna. We gathered in the kitchen and ate until every grain and morsel was devoured. We were undaunted by the prospect of repercussions, even as we consumed the last of a loaf of bread. We sampled, savored, and digested the sweets of freedom.

  We were quiet—too busy eating to worry about talking— which is probably why I did not miss Wallace until Tarabelle asked where he was.

  “Gone,” Edna answered, pointing toward the back door.

  “Probably went up to Mr. Frank’s,” Harvey said. “When did he leave?”

  Nobody answered; no one seemed to care. We had not dressed, washed our faces, brushed our teeth, or done any of the other things our mother required of us in the morning. I wasn’t sure Wallace had even dumped the night bucket.

  It was Sunday and we should have been in church, but we had gone to bed late and awakened late, and I guess that was our excuse.

  I went into the front room, draped my coat over my damp nightgown, stepped into a pair of shoes, and went out into the backyard. I followed the foot-worn trail past the outhouse and deep into the naked woods. Frosted brown leaves and twigs crunched beneath my feet as I walked. Above me, through the bare branches of birch trees, a gray sky mirrored my mood.

  The woods stretched southward for about a quarter mile and ended at a barbed-wire fence that protected Mr. Nathan Barnwell’s property from niggers. There was a sign to that effect nailed to a fence pole. Over the years we had used the sign for target practice, had thrown rocks at it, but we had never considered removing it. Harvey and Sam had ignored the sign several times, breaking through the bottom wires and coming home with their arms loaded with corn, beans, or tomatoes, and once with two chickens. Mama had said it was all right since they weren’t niggers anyway.

  As I returned to the house, I saw Wallace pass the washtub and dart beneath the clothesline. We reached the back steps at about the same time, and entered the house together.

  “Miss Pearl say Mama had a girl, ”Wallace announced excitedly, and if he had expected a celebration, he was sorely disappointed. Not even Laura or Edna, who were sprawled on the kitchen floor coloring the printed pages of a newspaper, responded to the news.

  “You think you grown, boy?” Harvey asked. “You just gon’ leave outta here and don’t say nothing to nobody?”

  “I wanted to see how Mama was doing, ”Wallace said.

  “How is she doing?” I asked, before Harvey could lash out again.

  “Miss Pearl say she had a hard time of it, and she’ll probably be in the hospital for a while.”

  “What’s a while?” Sam wanted to know.

  Wallace shrugged his shoulders. “I don’t know—just a while. That’s all Miss Pearl said. Ain’t y’all glad about the baby?”

  “Yeah, Wallace, we’re glad,” I answered.

  “Speak for yo’self, ”Tarabelle snapped. “Tangy, you always glad about something.Where we gon’ sleep a baby? What we gon’ feed it? Martha Jean gon’ spend her whole life looking after Mama’s babies. Shit! I ain’t glad.”

  “Me neither,” Sam said. “It ain’t that I got nothing against no baby, but something just ain’t right.Why this time Mama try to hide it, acting like she gon’ die and carrying on? Why she make it such a big secret?”

  “Mama’s no stranger to secrets,” I said.“We should all know by now that she has a private life, and she does not feel obligated to share it with her children. And that is what we are—her children. She has a right to . . .”

  “Shit!” Sam hissed.

  I stopped. M
r. Pace undoubtedly would have been proud of my rhetoric, but my siblings were staring at me as though I had grown an extra head.

  Tarabelle flicked a hand in my direction. “Y’all see,” she said. “That’s why I can’t stand her.”

  “Tangy Mae, you oughta quit,” Sam said. “What you trying to say anyway?”

  “Don’t matter how she say it, man, she right,” Harvey said.“Long as I can remember, Mama been hiding things from us. Far as I know, she didn’t tell nobody ’bout me, or you, or any of the rest of us. She got fat, and we just sort of knew it, but I don’t remember her coming right out saying nothing.”

  “Yeah, but did you ever hear her talking ’bout dying like she was doing?” Sam asked.

  “Don’t matter,” Harvey said.“Tan is right. Mama ain’t never told us much of nothing.”

  Harvey had given me the encouragement I needed to speak again, and this time I intended to be heard.“Ain’t nobody got no daddy,” I said, “except Archie Preston claiming to be Harvey’s. How come?”

  There was silence. I had broached a subject that was taboo, and they all stared at me again.“Tarabelle says it takes a man and . . .”

  “Don’t worry ’bout what I said, ”Tarabelle snapped.

  “You did say it, ”Wallace interjected.

  “That’s why people don’t tell children nothing. Children got big mouths, ”Tarabelle said.

  “You didn’t say it was a secret, ”Wallace responded in a wounded tone. He was big on keeping secrets.

  “What did Tarabelle say?” Harvey asked.

  Wallace glanced at Tarabelle, twiddled his thumbs for a second, then allowed his arms to swing at his sides as he began to repeat, verbatim, what Tarabelle had told us the night before.

  Harvey and Sam roared with laughter when Wallace was done telling. I stared at Tarabelle, expecting to see her seething with anger or squirming with discomfort, but her expression was as stoic as ever.