Memphis: A Novel(57)

Miriam furrowed her brow and continued on her cold walk along the icy streets of North Memphis. She turned left onto Locust Street and was taken aback by all the cars parked along their street. As she climbed the porch steps, she could hear the soft voices of adults inside.

The door opened for Miriam just as she reached to turn the knob. Miss Dawn stood before her, resplendent in a long batik housedress the color of a thousand rubies. Her head was wrapped in a matching scarf.

“Don’t you worry your mama with a thousand questions today, you hear?” she said, ushering Miriam into the warm house. “Your sister’s down for a nap now, too, and today is not the day to go waking her up.”

Inside the wallpapered parlor, Miriam saw many of the neighborhood women she knew and others she did not. Most were weeping. Miriam could tell by the smoke coming from the back of the house, and by the sound of deeper voices there, that men were chain-smoking in the kitchen. Unlike most of the political meetings that occurred at the house, this one seemed muted, melancholy.

“What kind of questions?” Miriam asked.

“You already doing it,” Miss Dawn whispered.

“Why won’t you tell me what’s going on?” Miriam persisted. “Why isn’t the record player on? Who are all these people? Why is everyone so upset?”

“She don’t know?”

Miriam heard her mother’s voice. She sounded weak, like a hurt bird. “Mama?” She scanned the parlor until she found her mother, perched on the piano stool. She had been obscured by a crowd of women holding handkerchiefs to their faces.

“You don’t know?” Hazel said.

“Know what? You know I stay late on Thursdays for piano.”

“Ah yes,” her mother said. “I forgot.”

There were whispers among the women in the front room. Miss Jade, wearing a houndstooth coat and a tall beehive, cried out, “Lord, what we going to do now?”

“It’s the end of the world,” said another woman in response.

Another groaned.

“Mama?” Miriam’s voice was pleading.

Miriam saw a flash of ruby. Miss Dawn was by her side again, the hem of her housedress sweeping the room’s Persian rug. She looked like a beating heart there in the dim room. She went to the large bay window.

“I should have known,” she said, her back to the room.

“Should have known what?” Miriam asked.

“There be stories of a cold settling in when an old king dies,” Miss Dawn declared, staring out the window. “Dr. King was shot.” Miss Dawn didn’t take her eyes from the window as she added, “And killed.”

“Shot down like a goddamned dog,” Miss Jade said.

Miriam’s mother did something foreign, especially in front of all the guests. She hung her head and cried.

Miriam stood frozen, her coat still on, feeling like the only person not moving in the entire room of women weeping, wailing, blowing their noses, and rubbing each other’s backs. Unwittingly, she found herself catapulted into a memory from five years before, when she was eight and August was just a newborn.

That morning, while August slept, her mother had awoken Miriam with her favorite meal: breakfast. Miriam found fried green tomatoes, shrimp and grits, fried salt pork, spicy scrambled eggs over rice, and buttery cornbread muffins to soak it up all laid out on the kitchen table.

Her mother had stood by the stove, watching Miriam eat. Her face, a stone wall.

Miriam, distracted by the smorgasbord in front of her, had not noticed her mother fill up the water jug. Suddenly, she’d felt cold water splash over her face and soak into her shirt.

She’d gasped, choking on the water, when a second unexpected thing happened: Her mother pushed her. Not too hard, but with enough force that Miriam rebounded against the green velvet cushions of the curved kitchen booth.

Miriam had propped herself back up and steadied herself for another blow.

Instead, her mother nodded. “You ready,” she had said.

Hazel took Miriam to her first sit-in that afternoon.

Four little girls had been blown up in a church that week, down in Birmingham. Hazel had pounded the kitchen counter as she told her daughter the news. Had to wear her hand in a bandage for a week.

Soaking wet and silent, her breakfast ruined, Miriam had understood.

Just as now, at twelve, Miriam saw, through the sea of bodies, the same wrath in her mother’s face as she had seen when those four girls were bombed and when Medgar died or whenever her father’s name was brought up.

In a rush, Miriam went to her mother, maneuvering between the other women’s stockinged legs like they were branches of a magnolia. She knelt at her mother’s feet. Reached up and cupped her mother’s face in her hands.

“Look at me, Mama. Go ahead. Look at me,” Miriam said, brushing away the foreign flowing tears. Her mother looked up and then into her daughter’s eyes.

“I got you,” Miriam said. It was both a declaration and an invitation.

Her mother’s face broke into a smile. She kissed Miriam’s forehead. Then she rested her head on top of Miriam’s. Closed her eyes.

“I got you,” Hazel repeated back.





CHAPTER 26


Joan


2001


When Daddy and my uncle Bird stepped fully into the parlor, Wolf cried. She lay on her back and showed Daddy her belly. He knelt to her then. I’d known it was him as soon as I heard Wolf whimper at the door. She made that soft cry for one person and one person only.