The Last Ballad(19)

When I was younger I was deeply hurt, deeply affected by not knowing the exact day of my birth. “It was June. I know that for a fact” was all Mother would say. She would say, “You can pick any day you want to be your birthday. A lot of folks get stuck with numbers that don’t suit them, and they pay for it for the rest of their lives.” But that was just mountain talk, all that stuff about signs and “haints” and old-time ways I suspect she never believed in.

One day, a few years before Mother passed, I was at Iva’s house. I can remember being amazed that Iva could read. Mother had been trying to teach me, and Iva had been trying to help, but I struggled. You have to understand that, back then, a lot of people could not read. White, black, it did not make any difference. My own father never learned to read as far as I know, but Iva could read. She could write too. I remember thinking that was about the greatest thing in the world.

There is one particular memory I have, one of the clearest of all my memories, which makes me wonder if I made it up, but surely not. Iva and I were sitting on the edge of her mother’s porch late one afternoon playing with some dolls we had made out of old stockings. Rose and Otis sat out in the grass by the road. Your father had found a puddle and was trying to float a little boat he had built from sticks with one of our old stockings for a sail. Rose was right there beside him.

As you can imagine, it was unusual for whites and blacks to live so close together back then, and it was even more unusual for us all to play together the way we did, but we didn’t know any different. By the time we were sent to the orphanage after Mother died, all the children there had heard about us, who we were, who Mother was, what she had done. They had heard about how we lived with black people in Stumptown, and I remember some of the children at the orphanage whispering “nigger lover” and things like that when they were close enough for me to hear it. I had never once in my life heard that word. I had no idea what they were talking about until I made friends with a little redheaded girl named Lucy, my first friend at Barium Springs. She said “nigger lover” meant that you were friendly with colored people. I wanted to say, “Good Lord, Lucy, colored people are the only friends I ever had until you.”

In this memory I am sitting on Iva’s mother’s porch watching a little old black woman come up the road at dusk. She walked right by Otis and Rose and stopped in front of Iva and me where we sat on the edge of the porch, our feet dangling off the side. The woman had on a purple dress and a hat that almost matched it, a big handbag on her forearm. When she spoke she spoke only to Iva. She would not look at me, which I remember thinking was strange at the time, but since then I have come to understand her reasons. I have forgotten what her name was, but Iva knew her. The woman said her daughter had just given birth to a son that morning. She reached into her handbag and pulled out an old family Bible and asked Iva if she would write down the baby’s name and the day of his birth inside.

I tried not to stare at that old lady while Iva went inside the house for her pencil or whatever it was she needed. My eyes traveled down through the trees to the road where Otis and Rose were playing on the edge of the yard, and I watched them splash in that puddle for a little bit, but no matter how hard I tried not to, I couldn’t keep my eyes from falling on that old woman. Her skin appeared to be as frail as old newspaper and just about as thin. She must have felt me looking at her, because her eye caught mine and she lowered her head and stared at the cool, dark dirt beneath the porch.

“Miss,” she whispered.

“Ma’am,” I whispered back.

And then the screen door slammed behind me and Iva was back on the porch. She took up that old woman’s Bible and scrawled out that baby boy’s name in just about the prettiest script I have ever seen, even though I was not able to read a word of it. Instead, I pretended that she was writing my own name—Lilly Wiggins—and my own birth date—whenever that was—inside that Bible.

The next morning, after Mother got home from work, I slid out from beneath my blanket and followed her to the stove. She was pregnant with Wink then, and I remember thinking about how hard it must be for her to bend down to the oven with her belly as big as it was. I believe Daddy must have run off as soon as he learned she was pregnant. Your grandfather was not a good man, Edwin. He could be nice sometimes, but he was never good.

I told Mother about the birth of that old woman’s grandson, and I told her about what I had seen Iva do. I asked her why we did not have a Bible with my name and my birthday written down inside it. She had just gotten the fire going in the oven, and she was rolling out dough for biscuits. Rose and Otis were still asleep just a few feet away from us. When Mother finished rolling out the dough she cut the biscuits, and then she looked at me.

“Lilly,” she said, “it was just you and me and that man who called himself your daddy in that wagon on the way down the mountain. And there wasn’t hardly food or money to go around for two of us, much less three.” She opened the oven door and slid the pan of biscuits inside. “If you think I was worried about toting along some Bible then I don’t think you know your mother as good you should.

“Besides,” she said, dusting her hands on the front of her dress, where her pregnant belly seemed to reach toward me, the dry flour and the cotton lint coming off her fingers like snow, “you don’t need no Bible to tell you that you exist in this world.”