Take My Hand(43)

The veins of her hands flexed as she moved the hook over and under the yarn. I moved to the end of the couch so I could better see.

“For as long as I can remember, the women in my family have made the best life they knew how. I bet when you first come out to the house on old man Adair’s place, you thought I was a nasty woman.”

“No, I never thought that.”

“You thought something. I saw it on your face. You looked around that house like it wasn’t fit for a mule. And you know what? You was right. You ain’t never lived in a one-room house with a dirt floor, nasty dogs, and the white man walking all up in there in his work boots without so much as a knock. That house wasn’t never mine. Just a way station where we was stopping on our way to someplace else. Only the train never come, and so we was left sitting there on that platform waiting for near about three years.”

She wrapped the loose yarn around an index finger.

“You ain’t interested in the ramblings of an old woman like me. I guess I just wanted to say to you that when you got us this apartment, I felt something like hope, something I ain’t felt in a long time. You know, I married Ernest T. Williams when I was eighteen years old. My husband promised me a better life. Every month, he brung home his money and put it in my hand. He would say, Don’t you ever get no ideas about me out there in them streets. You the only woman ever hug this neck. Then he died and left me. Just out of the blue, he had the nerve to go and die on me. Just like Mace wife died on him. Second time death knocked on my door near about destroyed me. I told the Lord to just go ahead and send for me.”

She stopped to wipe her nose with a tissue, then picked her needle back up. “So you come along and get us this here apartment, and the first night I slept in that bed in that back room, I dreamed my Ernest was still alive. We was living here together—me, him, Mace, the girls. Then somebody come and take it all away. Faceless people. Like ghosts but not ghosts. When I tried to stop them, they shouted words at us. Ugly words. I woke up scared. Every night since, I been expecting a knock at the door.”

“Nobody’s coming to take anything away from you, Mrs. Williams.”

“No, that’s where you wrong. They can always take it away. It ain’t yours, Miss Civil. None of this.” She waved a hand at the air, dropping the yarn. “Don’t you know that? Ain’t nobody ever taught you what they can take? They just take take take.”

The room dimmed, as if somebody had turned off a lamp. It became so quiet, I could hear the wind surging. I thought vaguely of the ice cream the girls had requested. I thought of other things I could buy, things I could gift. A radio. Clothes. Shoes. A toaster for the kitchen.

She spoke her next words in a whisper. “I know you thought less of me living out there in that shack, and I didn’t think so much of you neither, tell the truth.”

“And now?” Please, I wanted to say. Give it to me. I hadn’t known I needed her forgiveness, but my heart longed for it.

“Now I know the world exactly what I thought it was,” she said and cast her eyes downward.





TWENTY-THREE





We went to church all the time when I was growing up, but by the time I reached high school we had fallen off the wagon and begun the Easter–Christmas–New Year’s Eve circuit. In college I learned some words I had not comprehended before. Agnostic. Atheist. Our family was none of these. We were just irregular churchgoing Christians, though I had never been the kind of Christian to pray for intercession on behalf of my own desires. I was more of the gratitude-prayer type. Thank you for this food. Thank you for my family. Thank you for the roof over my head.

When I had the abortion I asked God for something—really asked, for the first time in my life. I asked for forgiveness. And though I did everything to put out of my mind that painful day of lying on a bed in a strange woman’s house, I could not forget. It wasn’t so much that I regretted it. I never doubted it was the right decision for me. It was that I had been raised to believe that such a thing was a sin. And that kind of upbringing was hard to shake.

The Roe v. Wade decision had come down on a Monday in January of 1973, and I remember the afternoon newspapers sold out as word spread. I watched my daddy sit down in his chair and silently read, shake his head and then leave the paper on the coffee table. We never discussed it, but surely he knew that there were houses out in the country where women went to have the procedure, even before the ruling. I’d gone to one in Opelika, one where Miss Pope believed I could get safe care. And it had still been a risk. Surely Daddy understood that women needed a trustworthy place. Some women traveled to New York to have the procedure, but that was too far for most of us. Make no mistake about it, that ruling was a big deal.

My belief that all women needed access to trained medical professionals, especially poor women, did not mean that I was without ambivalence. In the days after my procedure, I swung back and forth between guilt and anger. Guilt about not taking better precautions. Anger that I had to climb up on a plastic sheet–covered bed in a stranger’s house. It took months to level out my emotions. After the girls’ surgery, I experienced that same emotional pendulum. That’s why when Mama asked me to go to church with her one Sunday morning in July, I agreed. I had some unfinished business in that place of worship.

When we entered the sanctuary, Mama walked as if she had never missed a day—right up the side aisle to her regular seat in the row behind the missionaries. The pastor asked the congregation to bow our heads. He was young, hired out of Chicago. Once Dr. King changed the course of Montgomery, the Black churches stayed on the lookout for a King twin. This one at my family’s church was in his third year, and I had seen him preach only once. It struck me that he was still getting his bearings in Montgomery. Like many newcomers, he’d come out of awe for our history, but, even with his knowledge of all that our community had been through, he seemed to underestimate the will of his congregation. Black churches in Montgomery were more than buildings, more than houses of worship. They captured our collective activism, organized our frustrations. That significance of purpose, that seriousness, wore Mama out sometimes. That’s why we stopped going in the first place.