“But if you marry Mr. Lucas, you won’t be lonely and you’ll have peach cobbler every Sunday,” Fern said.
“Even Rickets knows the truth!” Ma Charles hollered.
But just to make sure the attention didn’t stray too far from her, Vonetta became Little Miss Ethel Waters and practiced the next day’s retelling for Ma Charles.
Every Sprig
It rained so heavily over the next two days, we stayed at Ma Charles’s and played Old Maid. When the sky’s color returned to clear blue and the air was once again clean-smelling, we ran outside and let the chickens out of the coop, and between us and Caleb, we kept an eye on them so they wouldn’t get away. Big Ma had me help her clip their wing feathers, which neither the chickens nor Fern appreciated, but clipping their wings made it easier to keep track of them while they strutted about the yard. When they had enough freedom, we chased them inside the run, where they could still strut about freely.
The next day we went back over to Miss Trotter’s, happy to have the walk and to wade down at the shallow end of the creek. After we had our fill of being on the other side, I told Miss Trotter, “I don’t understand why you can’t talk to your sister face-to-face, Miss Trotter.”
“Respect your elders, Delphine,” Vonetta said. “Great Miss Trotter can do what she wants.”
“You tell her,” Great Miss Trotter said.
“Well, she is eld,” Fern pointed out to me. “Past tense for old.”
Miss Trotter said, “She’s the one who must come this way and beg my pardon. She has to walk to my home and wipe clean that hex she put over my generations.”
“Hex?” I asked.
“It means bad luck,” Vonetta said.
“I know what it means,” I snapped at her. She was only brave because Miss Trotter was right there.
Miss Trotter said, “My sister has done many a wicked thing against me out of envy. Many a wicked thing.”
“Ma Charles?” I asked. “Our great-grandmother?”
“She wasn’t born a great-granny,” Miss Trotter said. “She was a young, wicked, jealous girl. When Steven Hazzard courted and married me, she married Henry Charles to keep up with me. My husband understood about my father and let me keep my name and let me name our son after my father. But the wicked one couldn’t let that be. One Sunday as we strolled in town, she on one side of the street with her husband, and me with mine and my son in arms, she said, ‘Well, if it isn’t the Trotters. Hiya, Steven Trotter.’ That was the last I seen of my husband.”
Miss Trotter didn’t strike me to be a crying woman, but I saw her tears well up although she wouldn’t let them roll. She pointed her finger at me and said, “She wiped out every sprig of my generations—she hates me so. Wiped out each one but JimmyTrotter.”
“Ma Charles didn’t do any such thing. She wouldn’t.” As I held my stare with Miss Trotter I knew it didn’t matter that I didn’t believe in hexes or curses. My great-aunt did, and for that matter, so did my great-grandmother.
Miss Trotter turned to Vonetta and put on her sweet voice. “What was that you told your sister?”
Vonetta knew when she was being coached and ate it up. “I told her to respect her elders.”
“That’s right! Respect!” Miss Trotter cried out. “You!”—she went from sweetness to pointing and almost shouting at me—“haven’t lived as long as my toenails! You don’t know what Naomi did and didn’t do. Would or wouldn’t do. Now, if she has something to say to me, she can journey over the creek on her two feet. Her two feet.” She turned to Vonetta, her helpmate. “Go get that cane, dear one.”
Vonetta took off like a foot soldier in Miss Trotter’s army. She returned with the wooden cane, presenting it with pride to her general.
“Yes, yes,” Miss Trotter said, and kissed Vonetta on her forehead. We weren’t a kissing kind of family, so Vonetta ate that right up. “She can borrow the cane she gave me to come beg my pardon.”
When we got to the house I asked my great-grandmother, “Why won’t you talk to your sister?”
My great-grandmother said, “I talk to her every day.”
“How is that?”
“Through prayer. I pray to the Lord for my half sister’s wicked soul.” But Ma Charles wasn’t joking with me. There was no winking or twinkle in her eyes.
Vonetta said, “Don’t worry, Ma Charles. I didn’t believe the part about you chasing her husband out of town.”
Ma Charles just laughed and laughed. “You tell the widow Hazzard I’m sorry for her loss.” She laughed some more.
“Cut it out, Vonetta,” I warned. “If you’re not going to say it right you shouldn’t say it at all.”
“Oh, hush,” Ma Charles said, eager for more. “What else she say?”
“Know what she said, Ma Charles?” Vonetta asked.
I kicked Vonetta, a really good one. Then Ma Charles said, “Don’t let me see you do that again.” And Vonetta moved closer to Ma Charles and rubbed the side of her leg.
“Now, what did the old cow say?”
“I’m not calling her an old cow, but Miss Trotter said if you want to talk to her face-to-face, you have to walk on your two left feet over the creek with the cane and take the hex off her first.” Vonetta added the part about “left” feet to stir up trouble. It worked.
Ma Charles leaped out of her chair—and she was generally slow-moving. “Oh! Oh! Spare her, Lord! Spare her, Lord! For I surely will get her! I surely will! Where’s my tambourine?”
Big Ma came running. “Mama, Mama! Mama, sit down! Sit down, Mama!” She turned to me. “Delphine, what did you do? What did you—”
Before I knew it, my grandmother backhanded me across the cheek so hard I saw white.
I stayed away from everyone for the next day and night. I stayed up in the pecan tree with my book when I could and slept on the porch at night. Since I had already run through the other two books I had packed, I had no choice but to finish Things Fall Apart. It was the perfect book, since Okonkwo couldn’t do right, and neither could any of the adults on this side of the creek or the other.
When I finally came down from my tree I went to Little Miss Ethel Waters first.
“Vonetta. You have to stop going back and forth telling those tales.”
“I’m not telling tales and you can’t tell me what to do.”
I wanted to hit her right then and there. If only Cecile could see her precious Vonetta now. “Watch out for Vonetta” my fat fanny.
“Our aunt and our great-grandma should be rocking on this porch together. Not sending poison pen letters back and forth through you.”
“So.”
“They’re old, Vonetta. And one of them is going to die first.” I refused to say it the southern hymn way—“the sweet by-and-by.” “Then the one left alive will say, ‘I miss my sister.’ And you’ll feel rotten in your rotten little heart because you helped to keep them apart. Then what?”
“Yeah, then what?” Fern asked.
Vonetta crossed her arms. “One thing’s for sure. I’ll never miss you.”
“Oh yeah? Well, I hope you don’t act like this when Pa and Mrs.’s baby comes.”
There was a lot of silence before there was anything else.
“What?” one asked loud.
“Baby?” The other, soft.
I didn’t mean to tell them like this. It slipped out. From the looks on their faces, one trying to be proud and cool, the other crumbling, I wished I had told them sooner. And nicely.
“Pa and Mrs. are having a baby,” I said. “That’s why she’s been so sick.”
“Babies don’t make you sick,” Vonetta said.
“This one’s making Mrs. sick,” I said.
“A baby?”
“A B-A-B-Y, baby,” Vonetta sang. “That means you won’t be the baby, you crybaby.”
“That means you won’t be the middle, you show-off.”
“Baby, baby, ’bout to cry. Wipe that tear from your eye.”
Fern didn’t
bother to ball up her fists or bang them at her sides, her warning that she was about to strike. She just started to windmill-punch at Vonetta, and I let her. Vonetta whipped free and dodged to her left, then right, like a fighter in the boxing ring, taunting and teasing Fern. Vonetta was discovering her longer legs, dodging and dashing off, avoiding Fern’s blows. Fern could never catch her, but I could.
“Stop picking on Fern just because you can!” I yelled at her.
“Fern’s a big baby.”
“And you’re afraid to get your watch back, you chicken.”
“I am not.”
“Chicken.”
“I’m not a chicken.”
“You’re more chicken than all those chickens in the yard—waving and smiling at those girls who are laughing at you. What do you think they call you? Certainly not Vonetta.”
“I hate you, Delphine.”
“I don’t care. Just stop picking on Fern. She’s your little sister.”
Vonetta opened her mouth like she was about to say something, then shut it and walked away.
Chickweed
Vonetta and Fern didn’t stay mad at each other for long. They never did. Even Vonetta and I got back to the way things were. Not completely, but enough. We didn’t really talk about things.
Still, I braced myself to answer their questions about the baby, but no one asked me anything. Vonetta didn’t say a word about it, but Fern went to Big Ma to ask why Pa and Mrs. needed to have a baby. Big Ma said, “Never you mind. That’s your father and his wife’s business,” and then she sent Fern out to the coop with a pan of chicken feed. Fern mistook the chickens clamoring about her for their need to talk, so whatever she had to say about the new baby she said to the chickens.
There was nothing I could do to stop Miss Trotter from telling her history to Vonetta, or to stop Vonetta from telling Ma Charles. Even when Miss Trotter got the best of Ma Charles there was a gleam in Ma Charles’s eyes when Vonetta “repaid” her with Miss Trotter’s words. One sister said her father knew every flower, leaf, and root, while the other said he never messed with that stuff, but instead went to the colored doctor and dentist in town and bought penny candy for her. They might as well still be in Miss Rice’s classroom pulling each other’s pigtails.
The dueling between the two sisters went on and on, from one side of the creek and, thanks to Vonetta, back over to the other side of the creek. It seemed the sisters shared their father equally but they were determined to prove which one was the right and true daughter of Slim Jim Trotter. Vonetta was sure to soak up every word, every expression, to reenact later.
Miss Trotter began the latest round of family history and pigtail-pulling. “So, you see, dear one,” she said sweetly, “it was her mama’s fault the law went looking for my father on the charge of bigamy.”
Fern’s eyes popped when she heard the new word. Bigamy. I’d have to tell her later it wasn’t the singsong word she might have imagined.
“Found him and jailed him. Took his government work papers. They were going to send him to the Creek Nation in Oklahoma. State capital is Oklahoma City.” She threw that one in like she was back in Miss Rice’s classroom. “Send him back to the reservation. But first there would be a trial at the courthouse in town.” She stopped to chuckle. “What they didn’t know was my father walked between worlds. No jail could hold him. And he became a crow and flew between the bars and flew to me and became himself and said, ‘Chickweed’—that’s what he called me. ‘Chickweed.’” Vonetta nodded like Miss Trotter did. “‘Papa’s gotta fly away. But I’ll come back to you, my chickweed. I’ll come back.’”
When we asked Miss Trotter if he came back she said no, and Vonetta matched her sorrow when she retold it to Ma Charles. “Never did.”
“Hmp,” Ma Charles said at the end of Vonetta’s retelling. “Is that what she told you? Hmp.”
“Ma, don’t start,” Big Ma said.
Ma Charles waved her away. “Hush, girl. If someone tells it, I’ll tell it. I have a right.”
“Right on,” Fern said.
“That’s right,” Ma Charles agreed. “Now hear this—especially you,” she said to Little Miss Ethel Waters. “My father was a God-fearing colored man. He didn’t turn into a crow like some demon. No sir!”
“Ma, please,” our grandmother pleaded, but Ma Charles was determined to tell her family history, so Big Ma’s pleas turned to anger. “This is your doing,” Big Ma said to Vonetta. To me she said, “And you keep bringing them over the creek.”
I shrugged. “Nothing to do here. So we help milk the cows.”
“Nothing to do?” Big Ma repeated. “Is that so? Well, I thought I’d let you have the vacation your Pa and stepmother wanted for you. There’s plenty of ironing if you’re bored. Teach you what wash day is all about.”
But Ma Charles wanted her say and told our grandmother to hush and gave her side of the story.
“My papa didn’t turn into a crow. He knew what these colored trials were for. Entertainment! White folk would get wind of colored trials and would come into town dressed like they were going to the theater with President Lincoln and fill all the seats in the courthouse. The coloreds were allowed to sit up in the balcony or in the back if they were a footman or maid. And the county attorney would ask questions in such a way as to encourage the colored person in the witness box to roll their eyes and shuck about and say words they didn’t know the meanings of. And the judge would allow the people in the gallery to laugh a bit before banging the gavel and calling for order. They couldn’t just take away my father’s work pass for good and put him on a train to the Oklahoma reservation. Not a half-colored man with two colored wives. No sir! They had to bring them all in court. Have the wives make grand Negro spectacles of themselves, calling each other ‘that over-the-creek woman.’
“I might not remember everything about my father, but I knew he stood taller than most men. So instead of making a mockery of my mother and me, and our holy union as a family under God, my father spared us from being the town joke. He even spared that over-the-creek woman. He waited until the sheriff went home and he unhinged the door to the jail cell with a pocket blade they didn’t bother to take from him. He unlocked the front door and made his way over to us. He kissed me on the head and told me to mind my ma. And I’m the one he called Chickweed. Me. Not her. And that was the last I saw of him. My papa.”
She took out her handkerchief from her bra and dabbed her eyes.
“See that?” Big Ma said. “No one needs to know this. You all just had to upset my mother.”
We didn’t hear the end of that for a week.
Still, Vonetta told Miss Trotter Ma Charles’s side. Using all of Ma Charles’s expressions. She even took a hankie she tied to the strap of her undershirt and cried into it.
To all that Miss Trotter said, “He called me Chickweed first.”
When Ma Charles had told her side of the story, Vonetta had no pity for her own great-grandmother’s tears. But when Miss Trotter’s tears fell, Vonetta placed her hand to her own lips, as if to tell herself to hush, to stop carrying their tales back and forth. I didn’t see it often, but I recognized a true look of sorrow and regret on my sister’s face, and for that alone, I was glad.
Going to Town
When Sophie gave all that she had for the afternoon, JimmyTrotter said, “Let’s make a run to town to deliver the milk. Last stop will be Aunt Naomi’s and her two quarts.”
“That’s right,” Vonetta crowed. “My milk for my cornflakes.”
“Our cornflakes,” Fern said. “As long as it’s all right with Sophie, it’s all right with me.”
“You can drive a car, cousin?” I asked. I couldn’t hide my awe and envy.
“Do you see a subway train around here?”
Vonetta and Fern screamed their excitement about going into town. We hadn’t seen anything but pine trees, a bloodhound, chickens, and two cows. Even the kick we got out of having our own pecan tree or gathering peaches and
lemons from Mr. Lucas’s trees waned after a short while.
“I guess it’s okay,” I said. “Let me call Big Ma to let her know we’re going.”
“She knows you’re with me,” he said in that easy way of his, “and that’s as good as her knowing. Come on, girl. Let’s load up and hop in the chariot.”
I knew better than to not call my grandmother but I was tired of being a killjoy, and my sisters and I were back in step with one another. We helped JimmyTrotter fill his crates with the quart bottles and he and I lugged them to the station wagon.
“We’re gone to town,” he called out to Miss Trotter.
She waved and said, “Then get going. If you call that gone.”
“We’ll circle around,” JimmyTrotter said as we pulled away from Miss Trotter’s. “First we’ll drop off at the Prestons’, the Owenses’, the Browns’, and the Newells’. Then we’ll hit town and deliver to the grocery store, the bakery, and then last stop, Aunt Naomi.” It always took a second to remember his aunt Naomi was my Ma Charles, but we cheered the delivery route like we knew where we were going.
Town wasn’t a whole lot of town, but as long as there was a candy store it was town enough. We found everything we’d been missing. Candy, Royal Crown Cola, potato chips, comic books, and magazines. I was just glad for the change in scenery.
JimmyTrotter tucked the bills in his wallet after making his deliveries. Not everyone paid him, but most of his customers did, like the grocery store owner and the bakery. He explained that he wasn’t their main milk supplier, but the bakery used only family-farmed milk and the grocery store still had a few customers like Ma Charles, who didn’t trust big dairy farms. They gladly paid for what they could get from family farmers like the Trotters.
“I suppose Miss Trotter wouldn’t mind if I treated you all to—” Vonetta and Fern screamed before he could get it out.
“Calm down,” I told them, although I was thrilled at the possibility of talking my cousin into treating me to a magazine.