Take My Hand(47)

I sat. I was wearing a pair of shorts and a T-shirt. I’d changed out of my uniform after work. It wasn’t how he usually saw me dressed, and I felt exposed. But he wasn’t looking at me. He picked up a rock and rolled it between his fingers. In this area of railroad crossover, the track split into branch lines. In one of the lanes, six abandoned cars sat rusting near an old beanery that looked as if it hadn’t been functional in years. Nothing moved, but I knew the line was active. We were close enough to feel the wind should a train come roaring by. But for now, all was quiet.

“Mace, talk to me. It’s driving me crazy that you won’t talk to me.”

“You don’t understand nothing. You just a little girl.”

His words stung. It sounded exactly like what I’d said to Lou. “Tell me how to make this right.”

“Make it right?”

“We’re filing a lawsuit to try to stop this from happening again. They got this young white lawyer.”

“Yeah, I heard about him coming around asking questions.”

“We’re taking the clinic to court.” I had not spoken to him about any of this, and I wanted to know how he felt. He had worked all day pushing pickles across the floor, as he called it. I didn’t know what that meant exactly. I had never been inside a factory of any kind. The sour stench of vinegar rose from his clothes.

“You want to lose your job?” he asked.

“That clinic needs to be shut down.” I stood up, and the bucket pitched over on its side. “I have done nothing but love your girls since the day I met them.”

He shook his head. “You a little rich girl who think you can come over here and play around in folk lives.”

“Who died and made you God and jury?”

“They done took away my girls’ womanhood!”

“Having children doesn’t make you a woman.”

“You think you know, but you don’t know.” His voice was tight and strained, and I could see his eyes reddening.

I didn’t know what to do. I stood there with my arms at my sides. He wiped at his dry face with the tail of his shirt.

“Mace.” I stepped closer and he pulled me to him.

“You remind me of her. She was just like you. Stubborn as a mule in mud.”

I started to shake my head, but he hushed me. “You got a way with the girls. And with Mama. She did, too. I think Mama grieved her passing more than anybody. But when you come around, it seem like Mama find new life again.” His breath blew warm on my face.

“Your mama hates me now.”

“I hated you, too. When I walked in that room and seen my two babies crying like they hadn’t even cried when they mama died, I thought I might kill somebody. And you were going to be first. But when I saw you, I knew. You was just as tore up inside as I was.”

The sun beat down on us, and I started to sweat. We were standing too close. He propped a foot up on the edge of the rail, and I leaned into his thigh. In the distance, I could hear the faint chug of a train whistle. I wanted to step back. He slid his arm around my waist, and something went soft inside me. For a moment I thought he would kiss me, and I closed my eyes. This rush of heat between us would make it all better. If he would just show me some tenderness, after all that had happened, both of us might survive this.

Suddenly, he let go and stepped back. He picked up a handful of rocks and threw them at a railroad car. They clanged loudly against the metal. “Let’s go,” he said and started walking back toward the path.

I stared at the overturned bucket. A line of ants gave chase up its side.





TWENTY-FIVE





The morning the paper announced Lou’s lawsuit, I found Mama lying on the floor of her studio. Sometimes she did that when she worked late, but with her recent desire to start going to church again, I worried something was amiss. She had bundled a drop cloth as a pillow, but she was still wearing her shoes.

“Mama?”

She lifted her head. Her once-dark hair was now fine and silver. I helped her sit up, and she leaned back into the sofa.

In pictures Mama is lovely, the most stunning woman I’ve ever seen. She has these features that always seem to catch the light, and when you look at a picture of her, you can’t stop staring. In every picture she appears caught off guard when the shutter snaps. It’s always the same expression: eyebrows up, a casual look at something just away from the camera. She never relaxes into a photograph, never tries to see the person on the other side of the lens. I would say Mama is guarded in photographs, as if she has just held up a shield the moment the camera is lifted.

I used to think the same thing about her paintings. Their attraction lay in something just off-center. She often went through phases—some years everything was all bright and bold, other years the colors more muted or sheer. She would use three-inch-wide brushes to create swaths of color in the middle of a solid canvas. The works rarely left you cold. Even the smallest ones drew the eye.

Daddy said the only reason she hadn’t become famous in the 1960s was that it was a time when Black artists were claiming representational art as a form of political expression. How could anybody read protest into brushstrokes and color? A lot of people could not understand the freedom in that, he would say.

Mama had exhibited a few times in the Montgomery Museum of Fine Arts. The museum director hosted her as a means of reaching out to Black folks in Montgomery, a halfhearted effort since the white patrons of the museum never came to her exhibits. But Mama’s friends came. They streamed in, wearing bright outfits they considered appropriate for art, carrying cakes for the reception. Though only a few of them actually bought a painting over the years, they filled the room with love and support. Mama gave away more paintings than she sold. There was even one hanging in City Hall, though we suspected most white folks did not know it was painted by one of the city’s colored residents. After the exhibit ended, Daddy and I would carefully wrap the paintings and load them in the back of someone’s pickup truck to take to our house.