The Twelve Tribes of Hattie (2 page)

The main thoroughfare was congested with more people than Hattie had ever seen in one place. The sun was high. Automobile exhaust hung in the air alongside the tar smell of asphalt softening in the heat and the sickening odor of garbage rotting. Wheels rumbled on the paving stones, engines revved, paperboys called the headlines. Across the street a man in dirty clothes stood on the corner wailing a song, his hands at his sides, palms upturned. Hattie resisted the urge to cover her ears to block the rushing city sounds. She smelled the absence of trees before she saw it. Things were bigger in Philadelphia—that was true—and there was more of everything, too much of everything. But Hattie did not see a promised land in this tumult. It was, she thought, only Atlanta on a larger scale. She could manage it. But even as she declared herself adequate to the city, her knees knocked under her skirt and sweat rolled down her back. A hundred people had passed her in the few moments she’d been standing outside, but none of them were her mother and sisters. Hattie’s eyes hurt with the effort of scanning the faces of the passersby.

A cart at the end of the sidewalk caught her eye. Hattie had never seen a flower vendor’s cart. A white man sat on a stool with his shirtsleeves rolled and his hat tipped forward against the sun. Hattie set her satchel on the sidewalk and wiped her sweaty palms on her skirt. A Negro woman approached the cart. She indicated a bunch of flowers. The white man stood—he did not hesitate, his body didn’t contort into a posture of menace—and took the flowers from a bucket. Before wrapping them in paper, he shook the water gently from the stems. The Negro woman handed him the money. Had their hands brushed?

As the woman with the flowers took her change and moved to put it in her purse, she upset three of the flower arrangements. Vases and blossoms tumbled from the cart and crashed on to the pavement. Hattie stiffened, waiting for the inevitable explosion. She waited for the other Negroes to step back and away from the object of the violence that was surely coming. She waited for the moment in which she would have to shield her eyes from the woman and whatever horror would ensue. The vendor stooped to pick up the mess. The Negro woman gestured apologetically and reached into her purse again, presumably to pay for what she’d damaged. In a couple of minutes it was all settled, and the woman walked on down the street with her nose in the paper cone of flowers, as if nothing had happened.

Hattie looked more closely at the crowd on the sidewalk. The Negroes did not step into the gutters to let the whites pass and they did not stare doggedly at their own feet. Four Negro girls walked by, teenagers like Hattie, chatting to one another. Just girls in conversation, giggling and easy, the way only white girls walked and talked in the city streets of Georgia. Hattie leaned forward to watch them progress down the block. At last, her mother and sisters exited the station and came to stand next to her. “Mama,” Hattie said. “I’ll never go back. Never.”

PHILADELPHIA PITCHED FORWARD
and struck his forehead on Jubilee’s shoulder before Hattie could catch him. He breathed in ragged wet whistles. His hands were open and limp at his sides. Hattie shook him; he flopped like a rag doll. Jubilee too was weakening. She could hold her head up, but she couldn’t focus her eyes. Hattie held both babies in her arms and made an awkward lunge for the bottle of ipecac. Philadelphia made a low choking sound and looked up at his mother, bewildered. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I don’t understand either. I’ll make it better. I’m so sorry.” The ipecac slipped from her grasp and shattered against the tile. Hattie squatted next to the tub, Philadelphia in one arm and Jubilee balanced in her lap. She turned the faucet for the hot water and waited. Jubilee coughed as best she could, as best she could she pulled the air into her body. Hattie put her fingertips to the running water. It was ice cold.

There was no time to load the furnace in the basement and no time to wait for the water to heat. Philadelphia was listless, his leg kicked against Hattie’s stomach involuntarily. His head lay heavy on her shoulder. Hattie crossed the bathroom. She stepped down onto the shards from the broken bottle and cut her foot; she bloodied the white tile and the wood floor in the hallway. In her bedroom she pulled the quilt from her bed and wrapped it around her children. In an instant she’d descended the stairs and was standing in the small foyer pulling on her shoes. The splinter of glass in her foot pushed in more deeply. She was out the door and down the porch steps. Wisps of condensation rose from her damp housedress and bare arms and faded into the cold, clear air. The sun was fully risen.

Hattie banged on a neighbor’s door. “Please help me!” she said to the woman who answered. Hattie didn’t know her name. Inside, the neighbor pulled back the quilt to reveal Jubilee and Philadelphia slumped against their mother’s chest. “Sweet Jesus. Oh sweet Lord,” she said. A young boy, the woman’s son, came into the living room. “Go for the doctor!” the woman shouted. She took Philadelphia from Hattie and ran up the stairs with him in her arms. Hattie followed, Jubilee limp against her.

“He’s still breathing,” the woman said. “Long as he’s still breathing.”

In the bathroom she plugged the tub. Hattie stood in the doorway, bouncing Jubilee, her hope waning as she watched the woman turn the hot water to full blast.

“I already did this!” Hattie cried. “Isn’t there anything else?”

The woman gave Philadelphia back to Hattie and rooted around in the medicine cabinet. She came away with a tin of camphor rub that she unscrewed and waved under the babies’ noses like smelling salts. Only Jubilee jerked her head away from the odor. Hattie was overwhelmed with futility—all this time she’d been struggling to save her babies, only to end up in another bathroom just like her own, with a woman as helpless against their illness as she was.

“What can I do?” Hattie looked at the woman through the steam. “Please tell me what to do.”

The neighbor found a glass tube with a bulb at the end; she used it to suction mucus from the babies’ noses and mouths. She kneeled in front of Hattie, near tears. “Dear Lord. Please, dear Lord, help us.” The woman suctioned and prayed.

Both babies’ eyelids were swollen and red with broken capillaries. Their breathing was shallow. Their chests rose and fell too quickly. Hattie did not know if Philadelphia and Jubilee were scared or if they understood what was happening to them. She didn’t know how to comfort them, but she wanted her voice to be the last in their ears, her face the last in their eyes. Hattie kissed her babies’ foreheads and cheeks. Their heads fell back against her arms. Between breaths, their eyes opened wide in panic. She heard a wet gurgling deep in their chests. They were drowning. Hattie could not bear their suffering, but she wanted them to go in peace, so she didn’t scream. She called them precious, she called them light and promise and cloud. The neighbor woman prayed in a steady murmur. She kept her hand on Hattie’s knee. The woman wouldn’t let go, even when Hattie tried to shake her off. It wasn’t much, but she could make it so the girl didn’t live this alone.

Jubilee fought the longest. She reached feebly for Philadelphia, but she was too weak to straighten her arm. Hattie put his hand into hers. She squeezed her babies. She rocked them. She pressed her cheeks to the tops of their heads. Oh, their velvet skin! She felt their deaths like a ripping in her body.

Hattie’s children died in the order in which they were born: first Philadelphia, then Jubilee.

Floyd

1948

T
HE BOARDINGHOUSE WAS
cleaner than most. The colored places, ones Floyd could afford, were generally in need of fumigation and a paint job. Floyd scratched the welts on his back. The last place had bedbugs. But he was in the South in summer … what could you do. Everything down here was overgrown and lousy with crawling, biting things. He walked into his room—hot, sure enough, despite the fan whirring in the window. The sheets were a little faded and threadbare, but the floors shone from a recent waxing, and there were some pretty white flowers in a vase on the nightstand.

“Ain’t that nice? My mamma used to put out cut flowers,” Darla said.

Damned if Darla wasn’t a loud woman, even when she called herself talking softly, it was like she was shouting at you from across the street. She stepped around Floyd and put her satchel on the floor next to the bed. She didn’t travel well, either. That is to say that her dress was wrinkled and her hair had napped around her forehead. She hadn’t stopped smoking during the five-hour drive—even when Floyd pulled over for her to go to the bathroom, a plume of smoke rose up from behind the bush where she squatted. All that smoke made her eyes red and her fingers yellow at the tips.

“I guess you know I might not come back here tonight. But you can stay in the room until you get yourself settled somewhere,” Floyd said.

“Ain’t no telling who’s gon’ be where by this evening.”

Darla was an easy, roll-with-the-punches type, even if she was a little cheap. The orange dress she was wearing was bright enough to give a body sunburn. Of course, Floyd had never met a concert-hall girl who wasn’t rough: they picked their teeth with their pinky nails or talked like they just walked out of a cotton field. He never held on to one for more than the night or two that he played a gig in any given town. This morning he’d dressed, grabbed his horn, and had a good start on creeping out of the door when Darla hopped out of bed and said, “Baby boy, I’m coming right along with you to the next place. I’m sick of this old town.” Must have been his hangover that made him say yes. Stupid. But there wasn’t anything to do about it now.

“You ought to take me out for something to eat,” she said, sitting on the boardinghouse bed.

Floyd frowned down at his shoes.

“What you pulling faces for? I know we ain’t going steady, don’t mean you can’t buy me a tomato sandwich.” Floyd smiled. “Shoot—a goddamn can of sardines. I never saw somebody so stiff.”

Darla’s shoe dangled from her toe. She kicked it playfully toward Floyd. “What you got to be so serious about? You need to learn to relax.”

“I know what I need,” Floyd said, shutting the door.

His shirt was off by the time he reached the bed, his pants a minute later. He unzipped Darla’s dress, and that was all there was as far as undressing. Nasty girl, she didn’t have a thing on underneath. Darla called him Daddy and Big Boy and yelled her head off, and they both had a good time. It was only marred by a photograph on the dresser—a sepia tone of a muscled hayseed on a horse, but Floyd couldn’t take his eyes off of him. It seemed to him that the young man’s gaze followed him around the room. He stared as Floyd ran his hand over Darla’s hips and stared as Floyd orgasmed. When they finished, Floyd rested his cheek against the sheet just close enough to feel the humid heat rising from Darla’s body.

The smell of sex filled the little room. When Darla got up to fiddle with the window fan, she didn’t wrap the sheet around her like a nicer girl would. She had a high, round behind and her thighs tapered down to her thin legs. They were, perhaps, a little too thin, but there was an efficiency about her body that Floyd liked.

He’d had a lot of bodies. Floyd was good-looking, and if he wasn’t as light skinned as some, he did have wavy black hair that curled at the temples. After a gig, he had his pick of women. In Philadelphia they called him Lady Boy Floyd. He’d had two women in a single night, three in the course of a full day. This was more easily accomplished in the South than it had been in Philadelphia. Never mind that at home he had taken women in bathrooms and the backseats of cars, he was convinced that Georgia women were loose. Maybe it was in the way they walked. Half of them—not the nice girls, of course—didn’t even wear girdles. And in the smaller towns some didn’t carry purses! They just switched down the street, hands swaying at their sides; you could do anything you wanted with that kind of free in a woman.

At home the women Floyd knew were mannered and proper like his mother and sisters. Hattie wanted him to stop playing and to marry. She’d forbidden him to practice in the house, and when he’d gotten a job as a janitor at the Downbeat Club, where he could meet the musicians who played there, she said only, “I don’t know why you’d want to clean up other people’s dirt.” When he met Hawkins and Pres, she didn’t comment at all. But it happened that a few nights a week, when he got back to the house on Wayne Street after a gig at a corn liquor bar or from scrubbing the bathrooms at the Downbeat, he found his mother awake and sitting in the window seat in her nightgown. She was bleary with insomnia but she’d smile at him, and they would sit together for a while in the silence of the hour.

When Floyd was a boy, in the years right after the twins died, it had been just Floyd and Cassie and Hattie. Hattie lay twisted in the sheets till noon. Some days, after hours of leaning against the footboard waiting for his mother to rise, Floyd would put his hand in front of her mouth to make sure she was breathing. She wore her white nightgown all day and floated through the rooms of the house like an iceberg, pale and silent. Floyd and Cassie ate the odd things their mother thought to feed them—cold rice with milk and sugar or a plate of buttered crackers or a bowl of half-cooked peas—at whatever hour she managed to prepare the food. When August came home in the evenings, there was music and whistling, and his voice, sad or angry but always insistent, telling Hattie to get dressed, bathe the children, comb her hair. Sometimes Aunt Marion came—she too was strident and bullying, or so it seemed to Floyd. But at some point the house emptied and silence returned. Though Hattie’s grief suffocated, though Floyd and Cassie were untended as strays, the cold, cloistered rooms of Wayne Street took on a kind of beauty in Floyd’s memory. Hattie rarely managed more than a wan smile, but she allowed Floyd and Cassie to climb into her lap, plait her hair, kiss her forehead, as though she were a living doll. They were companions, mother and children, equally vulnerable and yearning, drifting through the days together. Even now that Floyd was a grown man, there was an understanding between he and his mother, and Hattie was the only person in this world with whom Floyd was serene. He missed her stillness. He was so often sunk in a loud, internal confusion that threatened to overwhelm him.

Floyd felt it most on the long drives between gigs, when he was alone in the car with the rotting-rose smell of the South pouring through the windows. His heart pinging in his chest from the bennies that kept him awake from one gig to the next, he’d fly along the roads, pressing the accelerator and feeling himself unhinged from reasonable desires. He stopped to refuel in towns composed of nothing but a clapboard church and a gas pump. There he would be directed to a house down the road where he might buy a plate of food for fifty cents. If the lady of the house was alone, if she was willing, they might go to the bedroom before Floyd got on the highway again. There had been too a big buck of a gas station attendant in Mississippi and a man working a general store in Kentucky. They had gone round back in the high heat of the afternoon when road and store were deserted.

Floyd’s tour was his first time away from home for any significant period. The longer he was away, the more he indulged the urges he had managed, for the most part, to suppress in Philadelphia. They grew more insistent in the months he’d been on the road, more reckless and more difficult to reconcile with the man he understood himself to be.

AND NOW
here he was in another boardinghouse with a stranger in another town where he didn’t even know which way to go for a cup of coffee. This South. What was he doing, after all, wandering in this wilderness with only his trumpet and a few dollars in his pockets? Floyd had wanted to leave Philadelphia. He was twenty-two and eager to make a name for himself as a musician. He’d come down here to play the jukes and jazz joints, but he was three months into this shabby little tour and felt like a kite broken off from its string.

He stood in front of the dresser fidgeting with the knobs on the drawers.

“Lord, sugar. Ain’t you tired after all that?” Darla winked. “You need some more?”

“I’ll take some,” he said halfheartedly.

“Well, you got to come over here to get it.” She watched him rifle through the pile of clothes on the floor. “Oh, I wish you’d stop all that moving around! You making me nervous.”

Floyd fished a pack of cigarettes from the breast pocket of his jacket.

“Let me ask you something, sugar. What you doing down here? You look like them young fellas goes to Morehouse or somewhere.”

“Playing gigs,” Floyd said.

“They ain’t got jukes up north? You ain’t have to come all the way down here. You must got some reason for wanting to live two days here and three days there. Most folks don’t.”

“I just told you the reason.” Floyd said.

Darla shrugged. “It ain’t none of my business no how.”

The sun was going down. It was a dull sunset, a hazy band of orange low in the sky, the sun a red ball shrouded in clouds.

“I guess I’ll take a bath,” Floyd said.

He wrapped himself in a sheet and went down the hall toward the bathroom. His bath soothed him. When he returned to the room, Darla was fast asleep, nude and spread-eagled, her hair mashed against her head on one side and her mouth open. Floyd laughed. He felt an odd tenderness for Darla’s rough ways—she didn’t try to impress him. He fit himself around her on the bed and slept.

FLOYD WOKE
to voices in the street below. The room was dark aside from the lights coming in through the window and beneath the door. His mouth was gauzy with thirst, and he felt a kind of general, undirected irritation.

Darla woke and squinted at Floyd.

“What’s that ruckus?” she asked.

He didn’t answer. The voices in the street grew louder. From the window, Floyd saw a crowd moving down the boulevard in front of the boardinghouse. He turned on the overhead light.

“You trying to blind me?” Darla asked.

The last of Floyd’s clean clothes were wrinkled at the bottom of his suitcase. He kicked the dirty things into the corner and dressed quickly. The room was small around him, the scent of sweat and Darla’s cheap perfume cloying. And that damn hayseed farmer still looking out at him from the picture frame on the dresser.

“I’m going out,” Floyd said.

“Looks like it.” Darla stood and stretched, then bent to take another loud dress from her bag. Floyd tapped his foot, but Darla didn’t move any faster. He flipped his lighter open and closed. He sighed.

“Baby Boy, you got something you want to say?”

“I’ll head out, I guess.”

“You gone through all that huffing and puffing ’stead of just saying you was leaving?” Darla shook her head and turned back to her travel bag. “You a funny one,” she said.

Downstairs, the front door of the boardinghouse stood open, as though the proprietor had run off in a hurry. Outside, a crowd spread from curb to curb and spilled up onto the sidewalk. In place of streetlights, torches burned in tall stands at the corners. A man head to toe in vibrant green—green hat and shoes, green pants and shirt—beckoned for Floyd to join the parade. A woman draped in yards of snow-white fabric that puffed and billowed around her walked next to a man with symbols drawn in coal on his cheeks. Others carried a simple something in their hands: a branch in full flower, a stalk of sugar cane, a yellow bird in a cage.

The people beat tambourines and cowbells and two-stepped down the boulevard. It was not a dance that Floyd had ever seen, all thrusting pelvis and a low kind of chicken walk that made the women’s skirts ride up their thighs. A man dropped to a squat, then somersaulted to standing. The people whooped. He danced harder, and the yellow paint on his chest streaked with sweat. The smell of burning pitch filled the air, and another sweet smoky smell Floyd could not identify. A boy carrying small metal pails on a tray ran toward him.

“Myrrh? You want myrrh, mister?” he asked, gesturing toward the pails and the sweet smoke wafting from them.

“What is this?” Floyd asked.

“Seven Days!”

The boy darted back into the crowd.

When Floyd took the gig, no one had told him there would be a party. I’m all buttoned up like somebody’s grandfather, he thought, loosening the knot in his tie. A brass band played somewhere up ahead. This was the kind of night where anything might happen and damned if he hadn’t left his whiskey upstairs with Darla.

He leaned against the doorjamb of the boardinghouse and smoked a cigarette. You couldn’t see who was who in this craziness—everybody was up for everything, the men and the women, all sashay and switch and swagger. His fingers twitched in anticipation as they did right before his first song at a gig. After the host announced him, Floyd would take the stage and wait; he let the audience fidget and slurp their drinks and whisper until their anticipation swelled to yearning. Only then would he lift the horn to his lips. He always knew when the crowd was ripe.