“But, Janey, he had come back….”
“… Yes! That’s right! Yes! After all that pain that his leaving us had cost both of us, and against everything I had done to see to it that he wouldn’t even think of it, much less want it, he had to come back!”
“Janey,” Hickman said, “you’re leaving something out; You have to be….”
“I know, I know,” Janey sighed, “and it’s not doing a bit of good….”
“So why don’t you tell me?”
“Because if I did you’d have to listen to something terrible….”
“Well, I’m here, and I’ve heard terrible things before; even things like rape, incest, murder, and lynching. It goes with my job; so since I’ve heard of unwed mothers, why don’t you go back and fill me in on this girl you didn’t mention in your letter. I take it that she was his mother—why didn’t you write me about her?”
“Because I was upset and felt it was enough to warn you that out here where you least expected it some old bones were being stirred up. But I didn’t want to go too far because I felt that when the father ran away and you tried so hard to find him and couldn’t, you’d suffered enough. So why tell you what he’d done out here and make it worse?”
“But since you are my friend, why didn’t you let me be the judge of that?”
Sighing, Janey shook her head. “Oh, Alonzo, hadn’t I already caused you enough misery by turning you down? It wasn’t that I didn’t think about telling you, but what good would it have done? Could you have raised the child’s mother up from the grave? Could you have made that man come back here and own up to being the child’s father? No!”
“But I would have tried, I would have at least done something for that baby….”
“Yes, but you forget that when it happened we weren’t in touch with one another. And what’s more, you couldn’t catch up with the one who ruined her, and since he must have known what happened and that she had killed herself he probably figured that if he turned up out here again somebody would have cut his throat for him just as she had cut her own….”
Feeling suddenly numb, Hickman leaned forward, gazing into Janey’s tear-wet face.
“When did all this happen?”
“Back in the twenties, the early twenties….”
“And you mean to tell me that for all those years you let me come in here and play with that baby—the light-skinned one—and wouldn’t tell me who his daddy was? I can’t believe it….”
“No, Alonzo, I didn’t. But I would have; I was always prepared to tell you, and that’s the truth. All you had to do was to ask. That was all you had to do. Every time you came—and you remember that it wasn’t often in those days—I was just waiting for you to look at that child and say something about his resemblance to the other one when he was about that age. And if you had I was prepared to tell you. But you didn’t, and therefore I decided to just let the dry bones rest in peace while nature took its course.”
“Well, you did, but now it’s human nature we have to deal with…. Why didn’t you tell me?”
“Because I didn’t want you to know what that boy had done….”
“You were protecting me?”
“Yes, I guess I was. But I also remembered your saying something about what ought to be done with white men who ruin colored girls, and I was tempted to tell you then—just to hear what you’d say when you knew that it was him who had done it, that he was the child’s father. I mean what would you have said if the man only looked white, if it was a case in which no one knew or cared if he were white or black. But then I asked myself why should I hurt you some more. At the time you were very upset about something that had happened back in Georgia, so why add something that nothing could be done about to it? Beside, I felt that it might have turned you against the baby and I didn’t want that to happen.
“Anyway, and no matter how things turned out, you have to understand that I loved that baby. I loved him just as you loved his no-good father. I loved him and looked after him as though he was my own. And as far as I knew at that time his father could have been dead, or turned into a hobo like some of these ole puddn’- headed white men who’re always knocking on the back door asking for something to eat. That’s right! As far as I knew he could have been like one of them who’ll beg a colored woman for something to eat and then be too white-folks proud to come in and sit down like a decent human being and eat it….”
“I thought that kind of thing—hoboing, I mean—stopped with the war; is it still happening?”
“Not like it was back then, but sometimes.”
“And you’re still charitable?”
“Now don’t you go starting in on me, A.Z. Yes, I am. My religion teaches me to help the poor and the needy, and I do. They’re welcome to share whatever I have, but you might as well know that I won’t feed them unless they have the decency to recognize that they’re my guests. It’s simply a matter of sharing whatever the good Lord put here in my house to be shared. But as dirty and down-and-out as most of them are, some are just too white-folks proud to act decent. Not all, because some have enough sense to respect me as a giver and have been known to come back for more. That’s all I ask, but although I’m ashamed to admit it, whenever one comes knocking with his hand out and then refuses to come in and sit down like he’s been taught good manners I think about that child’s father and it fair ruins my day.”
“So you couldn’t accept the boy because you hate his father, was that it?”
“No, that’s not it, it was that he had changed. I loved that child and after he was taken from me there was nothing I could do but accept it. So I tried to make myself forget him. I even told myself that after what I did to him he’d never come back, but after all the years of my thinking that he had found some kind of happiness by living with his own flesh and blood, he’s back here asking me about his mother and father….”
“So I take it that you didn’t throw him out, that you talked with the man …”
“Yes, I finally calmed down enough to be polite; which Cliofus helped by being so happy to see him.”
“And what did he want?”
“He wanted me to tell him about his mother, and then he wanted to know who his daddy was.”
“And?”
“About his mother I could tell him the truth, that I knew her from the time she was a baby; back when her folks brought her along when they came to town for a visit. It wasn’t often because being Natives, they lived on one of the reservations with their Indian kinfolks. But when he asked me how he came to live with me I had to lie by telling him that when his mother realized that she was going to die she asked me to take him so that he could be brought up here in the city where the schools were better. There I lied, because she gave him to me out of shame over what had happened to her. Can you understand why I felt I had to do it?”
“Yes,” Hickman said, “I think I do—but what did you tell him about his daddy?”
“What could I tell him, A.Z.? I told him that I didn’t know his father, that I never met the man. Which was the truth. I never did. But then I had to lie again by telling him that at the time his mother died his daddy was away somewhere working on a job—only I didn’t tell him about the moving-picture part. And when he wanted to know why his mother hadn’t left him with his father instead of with me, I had to lie again. It meant protecting that scoundrel but I told him that I guessed it was because what happened had broken his father’s heart. That after he heard about his young wife dying so sudden he got so upset that he couldn’t stand to see this place again. But for all my lying it didn’t work….”
“He already knew the truth?”
“Maybe he didn’t know it, but he sure sensed something. Because the next thing I know he’s asking me if his parents were married….”
“And what did you tell him?”
“With him coming at me so sudden with so sincere a question, what could I tell him? I told him that they weren’t but that they intended to be
and that that was the reason his father was away when his mother died. That he was off raising money so they could get married and set up housekeeping. A.Z., I know how terrible it sounds, but I had to tell him something. So that’s what I told him. But for all my lying I don’t think he believed me. He just looked kind of sick and strange and didn’t say anything for a while, so I tried to lift his spirits by recalling how things were after he came to live with me. Then Cliofus took over, talking about the fun he and the rest of the boys used to have, and then I told him of how after a while his father got on his feet and began sending me checks so I could take better care of him. Which was the truth. I gave the devil his due for that, but I didn’t go into the rest, because now that the boy had come back I figured that he remembered….”]
“‘The rest’? What are you talking about?”
“About how he was taken from me and what I did, the thing that made his coming back so upsetting. He was so young at the time that I hoped he’d forget it, that it would be blotted out of his mind. In fact, that was my reason for doing it and now that I know that he remembers it’s about to kill me….”
Suddenly Janey buried her face in her hands, rocking from side to side.
“Janey,” Hickman said, “are you all right?”
“No,” she said, “and I doubt if I’ll ever be again….”
“But why? What did you do?”
“The worst thing I’ve ever done in my entire life, A.Z., and may the Lord forgive me. I was trying to make things easier for the child, but now it turns out that I made things worse for everybody. Do you understand? That’s why I couldn’t deal with his showing up here again, why I don’t want to recognize him as one of my little men….”
“Janey,” Hickman said, reaching out to touch her hand, “I’m here to help, so tell me….”
“I know, I know you are; but give me a little time….”
“Of course, take your time and then try to tell me from the beginning….”
Waiting in the quiet for Janey to continue he became aware of approaching music. A faint bright frill of sound, it floated in from the street like the sweet-sad echo of a distant carnival’s calliope tune he had heard long ago during a lonely walk in the dark. And as it drew closer and was joined by the rumbling note of a slow-moving van he was listening to a playful fuguing of Three Blind Mice and the gleeful, “Mommy! Mommy! Ice cream! Ice cream!” of a delighted child. And now as the bright tones skipped and frolicked across the air he relived an early visit during which he had hailed such a passing vendor and treated each of Janey’s little men to triple-dipped cones of ice cream; a treat at which, dangling bare legs and feet from the steps of the porch, they had licked away in grinning contentment….
Then while Janey looked on with a smile, there were seven young boys gorging on ice cream and me having fantasies of what might have been…. Cliofus and the one she’s worried about were among them, but where are the others? Where have they gone?
“Alonzo,” Janey said, “this is the way it was. On the first of the month this letter came, just as it had been coming all along….”
“You mean that he had been writing to you?” Hickman said.
“Not him, A.Z., his lawyer….”
“From a lawyer—and where did this lawyer write from?”
“Always from Boston—but I didn’t mean to say that he wrote me letters. Actually they were just envelopes with the checks he had his lawyer send me.”
“What name was he using?”
“That I never knew, because it was always this lawyer, Mr. Delano, who made out the checks.”
“But didn’t he ever send you some kind of message?”
“Only in the first one, and even that was from the lawyer, who explained that the money was for the child, and that from then on they would be coming once a month. Which they did. He kept his word. Those checks came as regular as if they were sent by somebody paying off a debt on the installment plan, but there was never anything else. Never once was I asked what I did with the money, or how the child was getting on. But come the first of the month and I could expect a check folded in a blank sheet of paper….”
“For how long did you receive them?”
“For about seven years. Seven years of nothing but checks, and then I did get one with a letter in it. It was from this lawyer, and like always there was a check, but this time he wrote me that the child’s father had other plans for him and that I was to get him ready to leave here. He didn’t say why, when, or where they were taking the child, only that I was to get him ready. A.Z., I tell you, I was so torn apart that it was like they had gone up in an airplane and dropped a bomb on the house the way they did when they had that riot in Tulsa. I was just about blown apart with the misery of knowing that the child was going to be taken from me.
“And not only that, because there was the problem of how I was going to go about it. How was I going to make the child understand that after all that time when he hadn’t had anybody but me, his father had come to life and decided to take him from the only home he’d ever known? How was I to tell him, much less explain, how it could happen or why? I didn’t even know if the man had the legal right to take him—which I doubted—but then I figured that he did because this lawyer had been handling things for him all along….”
“But didn’t you try to get some advice?” Hickman said. “I can understand why you didn’t get in touch with me, but didn’t you consult your pastor?”
“No, A.Z., I didn’t. I wanted to, but that would have meant telling him about the child’s mother and all, and about things that happened out here long before he came to town. So I didn’t….”
“So what did you do?”
“They didn’t give me time to think, A.Z. A day after this letter arrives this lawyer, Mr. Delano, shows up …”
“… You mean that he came to see you?”
“That’s right. He turned out to be a Northern white man who drove out here one day in a taxi at a time when all the boys were at school. I guess he must have timed it that way so he wouldn’t be overheard. Anyway, he knocked on the door and when I went to answer I knew right away who he was.
“He was a middle-aged white man, and a very polite one, so although I dreaded what would happen next I asked him in. And like I say, he was smooth and polite and continued to be as he went about explaining what was to be done. Told me that the child’s father was now a wealthy man and wanted him to be brought up in a way that he couldn’t be out here with us—probably meaning with ‘niggers,’ but he was careful not to say so. He then said that the boy had reached the right age for the change, being in the second grade and all. So up to that point I just listened while I asked myself where was this so-called father when the boy had the whooping cough? What was he doing when I was bringing him through the measles? Where was he when the child was learning to read and deal with other children who teased him about his looks and color? I was getting a bit worked up, so I told him that while I could understand how the father might feel about wanting the best for his child I couldn’t for the life of me understand why the man didn’t bring himself on out here so he could get to know the child and let the child know him before snatching him away. Because as things stood the poor child didn’t even know that he had a father. And as far as he knew he was just another one of my little men, my orphans.
“Well, the lawyer—this Mr. Delano—explained that the child’s father was a very busy man, but that he was sure that once the child got to his fine new home and saw how nice it was everything would be all right. It was like asking me to tell some poor traveler that when he reached a certain spot up the road a piece he’d be able to see the Promised Land but to leave out the fact that he’d have to climb a mountain just to get near the spot.
“So that’s when I sat back and asked him real quiet: ‘But how about me, Mr. Delano? How am I going to find the words to tell the child? How am I going to prepare him?’
“So with that he just sits there looking up at th
e ceiling and a-twiddling his manicured thumbs like he’d never even given it a thought. Until finally he gives me one of those there’s-nothing-to-be-worried-about smiles and says, ‘Oh, you’ll find a way. Since you care for the boy and it’s to his advantage, I’m sure that you’ll make it easy for him. And by the way,’ he says, ‘my client, his father, instructed me to tell you how much he appreciates what you’ve done for the boy, and that he regrets being unable to tell you in person. And naturally, he expects to reward you for all the trouble you’ve had in seeing after the boy. And you can take my word that he’ll be most generous.’ That’s what he said, sitting there talking like some kind of Northern honey-dripper in that fancy accent of his.
“Well, A.Z., all I could do was look at him, sitting there all calm and smiling. It was like they thought I had been taking care of that child for that low-down floater instead of trying to do my Christian duty. And I mean both for the child and for his poor dead mother. I did it on my own, just as I took on the others on my own. But there I was, with this rich white lawyer sitting here with his smooth blue-veined hands running off at the mouth as though instead of discussing the future of a human child we were deciding the best way to dispose a brood of chickens … or maybe send a calf to market. And while I’m listening to his trying to sweet-talk me I’m thinking, What am I going to do? What am I going to do!
“So now I’m sitting there feeling like he’d struck me on the head with the flat side of an axe while the pain was standing somewhere off in a corner just watching and waiting to rush out and knock me down. I could feel it building up strength to crush me, and I knew that as far as those two men were concerned what happened to me wouldn’t matter a damn. Because it was plain that in their way of thinking I had no claim or say-so whatsoever, no matter how long I had loved and looked after that child. So in a way of speaking they were telling me, Janey Glover, ‘We appreciate what you’ve done for the boy and all, but as far as we’re concerned you’re nothing but a handkerchief-headed mammy, and it’s better that he leaves you behind him.’