It didn’t take too long for me to know I wouldn’t be changing my name to some Swahili translation for “oldest, tallest daughter.” Even the cherry Jolly Rancher soured in my mouth as I read. How could this be a great African novel if the people weren’t so great?
The more I read, the less I liked Okonkwo, the main character. I couldn’t understand why the writer would spend an entire book on such a mean, selfish ogre, or why my sixth-grade teacher thought it was a great book. He’d read the cover ragged! I kept waiting for the story to be the fine literature that even my stepmother declared it to be. Even if Okonkwo changed or did something right or heroic, I still wouldn’t like him.
I could have kicked myself for being trapped with mean, murdering Okonkwo when The Soul Brothers and Sister Lou and The Outsiders rattled around unread in the underbelly of our Greyhound. It wasn’t fair to have waited for so long to read a book that was less than what I’d imagined.
There I was, without the book I’d hoped for. Stuck for hours and hours with a story I didn’t want to read. Next to a boy who wouldn’t let me practice boy-talking with him. I might as well have been stuck between Vonetta and Fern, kicking, punching, and yowling like cats.
At least my sisters weren’t miserable.
I glanced over at Fern and envied the way she raised her eyebrows, a sure sign that she was loving her story and couldn’t wait to turn the page. I could even guess which part of her story she was at. How I longed for any one of my books locked in my suitcase.
When we pulled in for our stop in Spartanburg, South Carolina, the bus driver refused to let me retrieve my other books from my suitcase, no matter how politely I asked. You think I can haul out every piece of luggage for every passenger? The bus driver didn’t have time for that, although he did retrieve my seatmate’s luggage—only because Spartanburg turned out to be the boy’s stop. We didn’t even bother to say any good-byes, and to boot, I’d soon be stuck with mean and unlucky Okonkwo for the rest of our trip, and we had a long, long way to go.
My sisters and I stood guard for one another in the bathrooms at every rest stop. If we stopped long enough, we’d join a few of the Young Saints from the bus for games of freeze tag and Mother May I? until it was time to reboard the bus. I didn’t want to use up our money in Spartanburg, but I had to reload our cooler with snacks and drinks for the rest of the ride.
There were only two working telephone booths. I was overdue for the call home to let Pa and Mrs. know that we were safely on our journey. I was anxious to get to the phone booth and had to wait my turn. I took my dimes and quarters and fed them into the slot, each coin clinking down one after the other. I dialed the number while Vonetta and Fern cupped their hands at the coin return just in case. I had everything well timed. The phone rang once. I prepared to hang up the receiver but I heard a sound on the other end. A voice. It was Mrs. She’d picked up the phone when she was supposed to let it ring. Now we’d lose our coins!
“Hullo?” Her voice was heavy with sleep.
It was too late to hang up so I answered. “Hello, Mrs.”
“Delphine!” She perked up like she missed us and was genuinely glad to hear my voice. I couldn’t stop Vonetta and Fern from saying their hellos in the background, and she seemed to like it because she laughed.
“We’re fine, Mrs. But you weren’t supposed to pick up the phone,” I said, almost scolding her. “Pa and I had it worked out so I could call in one more time before we got to Atlanta.”
“Pure nonsense!” Mrs. declared. “Pure, utter nonsense. You call collect at every stop to let us know you and your sisters are all right. I wasn’t crazy about you girls traveling south all alone to begin with.”
“We’re all right,” I said.
“We’re safe,” Vonetta said. “There’s lots of kids going south for the summer.”
“Surely are. Like birds flying south in the winter.”
Then Vonetta made fun of what Fern said and I had to push them away from the phone.
“We’re all right,” I said again. The last thing I wanted was for Mrs. and Pa to fight over us traveling by ourselves.
“Delphine, you call collect every chance you get,” Mrs. said.
“Pa won’t like it,” I said.
She laughed. “Don’t you worry about that.”
“Mrs. . . . ?” I asked slowly, even though I was eating up the coins and minutes.
“Yes, Delphine?”
“Is everything with you and Pa—”
She cut me off as if she knew what was on my mind. “Everything is fine, Delphine.”
The last fight they had was because Mrs. was sick. Pa said, “I never knew a woman could get so sick,” and Mrs. yelled at him, “Stop comparing me to Cecile!” and she took some things and left for a few days. Then she came back.
“And are you—”
“Delphine, I’m fine.” I could almost see her smile. “Now stop worrying, and have some fun. It’s summertime.”
But I couldn’t help it. I added, “See you when we get back home,” just to hear what she’d say.
“We’ll be here,” she sang.
She almost sounded like the old Mrs., or like Miss Marva Hendrix. Sure of herself and speaking her mind. It had taken me a while to like her, and I knew I really liked her when I began to miss hearing her speak her mind.
“Fifty cents, please,” the operator interrupted. “Please deposit another fifty cents for the next three minutes.”
Vonetta and Fern yelped their good-byes and we lost the connection.
Everything Is Everything
No one was happier than Vonetta and Fern to get off the bus for good. We weren’t done traveling but at least we’d be off the Greyhound. Now that we’d been cooped up on the bus for more than a day, and Vonetta and Fern had long ago worn out their “best behavior,” I saw that Papa knew best by putting us on the bus in New Jersey instead of in New York City. We couldn’t have made it one mile farther. Even though the bus transfer from Atlanta to Montgomery would have taken only a few hours, that would have meant a few hours more than we could have stood. It was a miracle Vonetta made it from New Jersey to Atlanta without picking on Fern, and a bigger miracle that Fern’s watch still hung from her puny wrist. I was just glad we survived more than a day’s worth of riding without a real reason to call home.
Mrs. turned out to be right after all. Pa didn’t mind me calling collect when we reached Atlanta. He told me what a good job I had done getting my sisters down south safely and I soaked it in. Neither Pa nor my real mother, Cecile, were long on praise. I had to enjoy the few words they sprinkled when I got them.
Pa said, “You know Mr. Lucas’s truck when you see it.”
“Yes, Pa,” I said. “I know Mr. Lucas’s truck when I see it,” I repeated back for my sisters.
“I know Mr. Lucas’s truck too,” Vonetta said.
“It’s blue, Papa!” Fern added. “Blue and rusty.” I waved my hand to shush them. Still, I couldn’t believe Fern remembered the old blue truck. Fern was five when we had come down for the funerals. She was smaller than small and sat on my lap back then.
Fern and Vonetta played invisible hopscotch next to the luggage while I waited for Big Ma and Mr. Lucas to drive up in his truck. Mr. Lucas, a widower with no kids, was practically Big Ma’s brother. The Charles and Lucas homes had been standing within shouting distance from each other for more than ninety years. Mr. Lucas had always treated Big Ma’s mother, Ma Charles, like she was his mother, and took care of things for our great-grandmother, especially when Big Ma had come to stay with us in Brooklyn.
We still had to drive to Big Ma’s small yellow house that stood on about an acre of land, just off the edge of Prattville proper in Autauga County. I looked forward to seeing the big blue truck. Mr. Lucas was sure to bring us bags of unshelled pecans covered in sugar and salt, and maybe a few ripe peaches. Mr. Lucas and Papa always sang “Old Man River” and other songs on the porch in the evening. Mr. Lucas could dip his voice low to si
ng baritone and make us laugh. We welcomed his treats and attention. He was the closest thing to a grandpa we’d ever have. We didn’t know Cecile’s people, and Grandpa Gaither died the year Uncle Darnell was born, although Big Ma never talked about that.
I was the first to see the old Ford truck riding up. Then Vonetta and Fern saw it and stopped in the middle of Fern’s hopscotch turn. They began to do their praise dancing, glad that we’d soon see Big Ma and Ma Charles. If Big Ma could have seen them jumping and shouting “Hallelujah!” she would have given them a real reason to jump. But she would have gotten to me first for letting them carry on in public.
The old truck bounced in the distance. When it was maybe one hundred feet away, approaching slowly, I realized Mr. Lucas wasn’t behind the wheel. The girls must have realized it also because they stopped praise dancing—Fern reacting to Vonetta, whose face stiffened with recognition.
The truck came to an abrupt halt and lurched forward all at once. Uncle Darnell got out of the truck and came around. He stood with both hands on his hips and waited. He looked down before he looked up but then he came toward us. I knew Vonetta was still angry over what he had done to us but I missed him, maybe even more than when he’d been fighting in Vietnam. I knew he’d made us cry, and made Big Ma cry and worry, and made Pa hate him. But he was my uncle and I had given up hurting from what he had done to us a long time ago. He was my uncle and I couldn’t stop running until I was hugging him.
Vonetta’s hurt hadn’t dried up and she hadn’t forgotten a thing. She couldn’t let go because she didn’t get it. She couldn’t see how our family was scattering, piece by piece. She only cared that Uncle Darnell had stolen our concert money last year and ruined our chance to see the Jackson Five at Madison Square Garden. It didn’t matter to her that our uncle had gone to the army hospital to get himself cleaned up and off drugs. You’d have thought she was Fern when she set eyes on Uncle Darnell, clenching her fists and banging them at her sides, ready to fight. Vonetta marched up to Uncle Darnell, took one of her fists, and reared back the way the puncher shouldn’t if she didn’t want to be the “punchee.” Then she gave a war cry before letting him have it in the gut. She had been saving that up for months.
I knew a look of pity and shame when I saw one. He took her punch and said gently, “Vonetta.”
“I hate you. You junkie. You thief.”
Fern gasped aloud. Her natural instinct was to follow Vonetta, but this time she wouldn’t. She loved Michael Jackson, but she loved Uncle D more, and she clamped herself around him in a hug.
That left Vonetta outside of our hug and she seemed happy to not be a part of us.
“You hate me?” Uncle D asked her. “Still?” After all, he had sent us the Jackson Five album by special delivery to make up for stealing from us.
Vonetta showed her teeth like an animal. “I hate you.” She breathed short and heavy. “I hate you.”
“So you’re not going to ride with me up front?” he asked.
Vonetta crossed her arms. “Not for a sack full of candy.”
Fern looked at her like she was crazy.
“I’ll ride in the back,” Vonetta said.
“Ooh! In the truck part, where it’s nice and bumpity-bumpy! Me too!” Fern cried.
“There’s a huge bag of chicken feed back there to rest against,” Uncle D said.
“So,” Vonetta said. She hadn’t uncrossed her arms.
“Wait.” If Uncle Darnell was hurt by Vonetta he didn’t show it. He lifted our luggage onto the truck bed, then took a blanket from the front seat, shook it, and spread it down next to the luggage. He lifted Fern up and into the truck. He went to lift Vonetta but she said, “I can climb. I don’t need your help.” But she couldn’t climb and Uncle heaved her up into the truck bed next to Fern.
“No standing, no horsing around.” His voice changed. He was serious.
“We can wave at all the people we pass, right, Uncle Darnell?”
“You bet.” I think he waited for Vonetta to add her two cents, the way she normally would if Fern beat her to the first line. Vonetta stayed mum, arms crossed, chin pressed to her chest.
He and I got into the cab and we were off.
Uncle D was different. Older. He wasn’t twenty-one yet, but he wasn’t the way he used to be. Singing, dancing, telling us stories about princesses in the tower or about the Arabian Knight of Herkimer Street. The war had made him older. And the drugs. I didn’t know if people could be fixed. The way they showed it in health films, commercials, and episodes on crime stories, drugs turned you into something or someone else. Like in Old Yeller. Old Yeller was a good family dog who got bit by a rabid wolf while protecting the family. Then he became a mad dog foaming at the mouth and the only thing left to do was to shoot him. When Uncle D came home from Vietnam, he became like a ghost rattling his chain and moaning in the night. Then Pa said he had to leave our house.
I glanced at my uncle, who knew I was staring at him. Knew it but kept his eyes straight on the road.
“Uncle D . . .”
“Ask me what you want to ask.”
“You’re a grown man, right?”
“Grown enough.” He squinted against the sun and tilted his head my way. “Go ahead, Delphine. Ask.”
“Are you . . . all right?”
He knew what I was asking. Were the drugs gone for good? Did he sleep and moan all the time? Did his sniffling cold go away? And the hollering out in the night. Was that gone too?
“Mostly.”
“Mostly?”
Mostly wasn’t enough for me or what I wanted to hear. He said, “I did a lot of healing in the army hospital, Delphine. Some on the way down here.”
“But you’re better, right?”
His eyes went from the road to me and back to the road. Even though I loved him, I had been hurt by him. Underneath it all I was unsure and Fern was probably a little frightened. But only Vonetta was mad enough to stay mad. I asked him again if he was better. I had to tell my sisters to not be afraid and to not be mad. I had to tell them that it was all right. That he was all right.
“Mostly.” His voice was flat and old. Like Pa’s. “That’s all I can give you.”
We drove for a little less than three hours. I dozed off, but for how long, I didn’t know. When I awoke, the Georgia pine trees had become Alabama pine trees. I knew we were getting closer as every other town name had creek in it. We passed this creek town only to enter that creek town. The memories of driving past trees, ponds, lakes, creeks, and rivers flooded back to me from the last time we had driven down three years ago. Ponds and lakes were in Georgia. Rivers and creeks in Alabama. What did it matter? We were far from Brooklyn.
Then Uncle Darnell began to sing Stevie Wonder’s “Uptight (Everything’s Alright)” but he jumbled the words and sang “Everything is everything.” That was how I knew my old Uncle D was still in there.
Moon House
Can a bloodhound remember you from years back and smell you coming from half a mile away? Caleb’s welcome grew louder as we drove along the sparsely tree-lined road that would bring us to Ma Charles’s property. Uncle D winked at me as if to say, Girl, you were surely missed, and my heart clanged worse than when I got my first kiss from Ellis Carter. I wanted to be with my grandmother and my great-grandmother more than anything. I wanted us to all be together. As many of us under one roof as could fit. I needed to know we weren’t all falling apart.
I could see Ma Charles’s yellow aluminum siding house as we wound around the road. It seemed to have grown larger, and not only as we neared it: its size appeared to have doubled. The girls must have seen the house as well. They sang at the top of their lungs, “I’m Going Back to Indiana” even though we were in the heart of Alabama. I sang along with them. Finally, in the seconds that seemed longest, the truck bounced, shimmied, and slowly trailed up the dirt and gravel driveway of our great-grandmother’s house. Even the hens, fenced in by the wire chicken run, clucked and fussed in our honor.
Their fussing and squawking went on for as long as it took one hen to spot something tasty on the ground and the others to join in the scuffle to get a piece of it.
Caleb, sturdier than when I saw him last, didn’t stop singing his dog song, which was neither a true howl nor a bark. Then Big Ma stepped out on the front porch and scolded him for raising a ruckus. Ma Charles, who had been sitting on the porch in the pine rocker her father made, called out to the bloodhound and joined the noisy welcome, shaking the tambourine that she always kept nearby. Knowing my great-grandmother, she probably told the dog, “Go on, boy. Wake the dead.” One of the funniest things about being down home was that when Big Ma said, “Stop,” Ma Charles said, “Keep on.” All the pieces of down home came flooding up to greet me.
Uncle D stopped the truck and he and I got out. He went around to lift Vonetta and Fern out of the truck bed. My sisters and I became six knees in shorts galloping toward our grandmother. Before she had time to scold and fuss, Vonetta, Fern, and I were on her, circling her, squeezing her and feeling her squeeze us. Yes, we were surely missed. I took it all in: the firm but biscuit-doughy feel of Big Ma’s arms; her gardenia talcum powder and Dixie Peach hair grease dabbed under her wig around her temples. It was good to be circled by hands that smelled of pine cleaner and to be blotted by her coffee-breath kisses.
When Big Ma couldn’t stand another squeeze, she pushed us off of her and said, “Let’s not carry on for all the neighbors,” although the only neighbor within any visible range was Mr. Lucas.
“Come on, rascals!” our great-grandmother cried, her arms stretched outward. We ran over and hugged her, but carefully. Big Ma’s mother was wiry and upright but tender-skinned and small-boned. She rapped us all on the tops of our heads, one, two, three, and said, “Look at my young’ns,” as if there were an army of us. “Just look at you! All those heads inching to the sky.”