Three Days Before the Shooting ... (91 page)

“Now, now, Maud, that’s enough,” a woman called down from the second floor. “Like Lonnie said, you’re just getting yourself all worked up for nothing. Why don’t you come on up and get some rest?”

“What do you mean?” the cross-eyed woman screamed, turning and waving a skinny arm over her head, “‘for nothing’? I’m here calling on these gentlemen for help with my problem and you’re telling me that ain’t nothing the
matter?
That’s exactly why I’m calling on somebody that’s not all snarled up in this mess like we are. We been in it so long that we’re blind and I want to
be taught to
see!
So, darlin’, I’m calling on
them
because I feel like I’m about to blow my top! Understand? You’re a woman, so you ought to. I’m calling on these gentlemen because they
appear
to be
sane
. So I want them to put my mind at
ease!
The building is reeling and rocking and knocking with trouble and I believe to my soul that these two millionaire doctors of the spirit have been sent here in the nick of time to
save
us and you talking about it being
nothing?
Good God-a-mighty!”

“A.Z.,” Wilhite whispered, “you hear what she just called us?”

“If you did,” Hickman said, “then I guess I did too. But I wonder who on earth does she think we are?”

“Why, I knew when I woke up this morning that something terrible was going to happen,” the woman said, addressing him directly now. “Oh, yes! Because, gentlemen, last night I dreamed that I had given birth to three sweet little babies. That’s right! One of them was black and one was white and one was ‘riney red, and they looked alike as three little green peas. And, gentlemen, it was all so real that I still can’t believe that it didn’t happen. In fact, I don’t know whether it happened or not from the way I feel and remember it, it must have been real, it had to be….”

“Oh, come on now, Maud,” Lonnie Barnes said. “Dammit, woman, you better git a
holt
of yourself. You know dam’ well that you ain’t even married!”

“And don’t I know it,” the cross-eyed woman said. “Oh, but don’t I know it. But I’m going to be; oh, yes, I am! My bridegroom shall cometh! Yes he will! And besides, what has that got to do with it anyway? What does it matter if he comes before or after as long as he comes? Is that too much of a riddle for you, Mister Bigshot Lonnie Barnes? I gave birth to those babies just the same, all three of them; and I was so proud, so very, very proud. They come one right after the other—one, two, three!—and without all that labor and pain you hear so much about and even without a midwife or doctor. And I got right up and fixed them up real pretty in little pink and blue dresses and everything. Yes, and I bathed them and oiled them and powdered them and I wrapped them in a nice blanket and took them in my arms and went out on the street and showed them to everybody and told them how it happened and all. Oh, but they were so beautiful! So sweet and charming; such
dear
little babies. And they recognized me as their mother right away and they cooed and gurgled and looked at me with such dear little ole Negro smiles. Oh, yes! the sweetest kind of baby smiles.

“And do you know something, gentlemen? At first folks were surprised. They were shocked to see me with my babies. But then they started laughing at me and told me that I’d better quit kidding them and take those dear little babies back to their rightful mother. That’s right! And me so proud of my motherhood! And when I insisted that
I
was their mother they called me a liar. I tell you, gentlemen, there’s a lot of talk about love going around but
it don’t stop our folks from treating one another unkindly. So to prove my motherhood I took some of the ladies into a hallway and pulled up my clothes and I
showed them
. Yes, sir, gentlemen, I showed them myself and let them see from where all the life-giving blood and water had flowed.

“What! Oh, yes! I showed them the fish in the bird nest! I wasn’t ashamed.

“I showed them the O where all the A.B.C.s came out! I showed them the black eye that they were striking at and trying to ruin my good name!

“And I showed them the babies’ little raw belly buttons too. Showed them
everything!
But instead of
apologizing for
calling me a liar, and instead of being thankful for the wonderful thing that had happened to me, they
scorned me
. Here I have known some of them for years and thought they were my friends, but they upped and called me an ole loose-tailed bitch! That’s what they did, gentlemen. And so I want you gentlemen to know that I was hurt to the quick, to my heart and soul…. Because I had always wanted me a nice little baby and here I had been blessed with three. Not just one, but
three
—

“Sweet ones,” she said, smiling triumphantly and counting on her claw-like fingers. “One little, two little, three little, pretty little, plump little, cunning little cute ones!

“But,” she paused, frowning sadly as she shook her bewigged head, “but instead of being
happy
and
congratulating me
on finally coming through on my womanhood even though it was kinda late, they scorned me and called me a bitch! A
bitch!
How do you like that, gentlemen? And after I had
showed them
all my evidence, after I had gone so far as to uncover the boat in the bulrushes for them all to see, they
still
called me a bitch! You hear me? A bitch! How about that, gentlemen?”

Turning his head, Hickman caught a glimpse of Deacon Wilhite’s dumbfounded face—just as Lonnie Barnes threw up a fuzzy arm and gestured violently toward where a cluster of women were looking at the cross-eyed woman with expressions of fascinated disapproval.

“Dammit,” Barnes shouted, “will some of you ladies stop standing around looking like a bunch of gossip-sprouting bitches and get this dam’ woman out of here? This is awful! Disgraceful! Why … hell! that dam’ cherry of hers must have dried up and blown away way back around nineteen twenty-nine! I tell you this is
awful
!”

“Yes, it was awful. Yes!” the cross-eyed woman snapped. “But what does an old micturator like you know about something wonderful like this? What do
you
know about the woman’s role in life? Nothing!

“That’s why,” she said, appealing to Hickman in an earnest voice, “I want you two fine, intelligent-looking, leader-type gentlemen to answer me this: Was I wrong? Was I a bitch to give birth without a husband? And was it any worse than it would be if one of you gentlemen was to give a woman a baby without marrying her, without letting her be a mother?”

“What!” Barnes exploded. “Now how can anybody do that? How can a man give a woman a baby
without
making her a mother, that’s what I want to know—yeah. And how can a
woman
give a man a baby without his being a father?”

“Oh, you make me sick, Lonnie Barnes; you make me sick to my stomach! It’s for me to know and for you to find out, so shut up! But was it, gentlemen? Is it? Is it any worse than it would be if a woman was to give
you
a baby that you didn’t know she was going to give you? Tell me, because I have to know!”

Suddenly Hickman felt a tightening of his nerves that seemed to bring a sharpening of his hearing as now with a sense of unreality he watched the woman’s eyes appear to flame brighter than the lightbulb suspended from a cord above her head. Somehow her questions had taken on a note of personal significance and as his sense of unreality grew he heard a young woman’s thin, anguished voice calling down from the floor above:

“But Miss Maud, you … you just told us that it was all a
dream
, Miss Maud …”

“Yes, darlin’,” the cross-eyed woman said, raising her head with a wildly radiant smile, “that’s right. But you forget, darlin’, that sometimes dreams are
real…
.”

Then he could hear Lonnie Barnes roaring, “Oh, my God! Will you listen to that? Now she’s done gone to contradicting a
contradiction!
By which I mean, she’s now trying to stand a dream on its head, turn the truth wrong-side out, and talking a dam’ hole straight through our skulls! Dammit, Maud, you
have flipped
! You have blown your top! Scrambled your brains! No doubt about it! If that dream was real, then where the hell are the babies? That’s what I want to know, WHERE ARE THE DAM’ BABIES!”

“Fool,” Hickman heard, “they were taken away! That’s what I’m trying to tell these gentlemen. Somebody slipped into my room and
took
them! While I was out buying them some soft little booties for their little feet and little ribbons and bows and such things as Johnson’s Baby Oil and talcum powder and safety pins for their little didies, and some soft little brushes and some nice little combs, somebody came in and took them away. One of the brushes and combs was white, one was pink, and the other was blue, and you can go look in my room and see for yourself. They’re all up there. And when I came back and found that the babies were not in their bed I rushed out to look for them and I searched for them everywhere. Over on the Howard campus, under the statues and by the trees in Lafayette Park. Up along the Mall and around the Washington Monument and near the middle gate in the White House fence. Even in back of Mister Lincoln’s knees, and all down along the riverbank where the people fishes. I asked everybody I met if they had seen my lost little babies, but nobody had seen them. And nobody would help me. I looked and I looked. I searched until I could barely walk and until I was so tired that I broke down and cried.

“Oh, I cried and
cried
! I cried so hard that I had to get off the street and come home to get some rest, and when I got here I was so brokenhearted that I cried myself to sleep. So now all this is happening to Mister Jessie … and me now babyless.”

Hickman watched her wiping her eyes with the back of her hand as she shook her head and then fixed him once again in her cross-focused eyes. “So please, please, gentlemen,” she pleaded; “please tell me: Am I being punished by having my three little babies kidnapped just because I wasn’t married? And if so, is
that justice?”

“OOOOOH, NO!” Barnes moaned,
“now
she’s done jumped on
justice
! They’ll do it every time! First they jump salty with the truth and then they start yelling about justice!”

“… I say is it justice,” the woman went on, “because does the good earth have to be married before it can give birth to spring? And if
it
doesn’t, then tell me why
I
have to be? Because aren’t all of us genuine, nitty-gritty black women the daughters of the earth? Of the rich, black, fruitful earth, who is the mother of us all, including that little nasty white rookie cop down there? And aren’t us black women supposed to be natural like the earth, our mama? So now tell me about this mixed-up mess! TELL ME!”

At the woman’s shout, Hickman stiffened, watching a glistening tear break from her eyes and course slowly down her cheeks, and he was stirred by a feeling mixed of compassion and painful distrust.

Falling silent as she awaited his answer, the woman’s crossed eyes were awash with tears; and as her imperious question flared and plunged through his mind on a series of swiftly repeated echoes, it was as though the taut covering of a child’s toy kite, flayed by the force of a sudden squall, was being ripped from the slender wooden cross which formed its fragile skeleton. Feeling compelled to answer, yet struggling against his sense of unreality, he was suddenly aware of the distorted surfacing of a story so intimately a part of him that for years it had existed in his consciousness less as a structure of events than as an emotion, an article of faith, a feeling, a vague yet basic and unquestioned support of his sense of life’s meaning, one which revealed itself in a special gentleness toward mothers and infants. So that now, as he struggled to bring it fully to consciousness it eluded him, it teased him cruelly. And all the more so because he knew, even as it evaded him, like the beating of his heart, or the rise and fall of his lungs in breathing, it had been with him constantly and for a long, long time. Still, for reasons which he suspected as being too painful for consciousness, it was reluctant to reveal itself, to announce its true name. And as he stood silently opening and closing his mouth, it whirled in his mind with the elusive, now-you-see-me, now-you-don’t motions of a single moth that opened suddenly and began a frantic flickering from light to shadow and back again in a parabolic flight above the cross-eyed woman’s head.

Straining forward, she addressed him again and waited, but now it was as though a wall of thick glass had descended between them, behind which, like a turbulence of smoke in a bottle, the traces of the story were reforming and becoming an even older but no less familiar one—of which, with quickening heart, he sensed it to be but a hysterically distorted shadow, a mocking mask.

His body and face were damp with sweat now, and as he stared upward across the massed heads and into the woman’s tear-stained face, this deeper story struggled gently but determinedly to assert itself. And in the turmoil of his mind he could feel its dispersed elements flying languidly together, as when a motion picture recording the bursting of a beautiful rose is reversed in slow motion, causing its scattered petals to float back with dream-like precision to resume the glorious form of its shattered design. Oblivious both to his will and to the goading of the woman’s shrill insistence, this older story was reassembling itself, roiling with silent swiftness out of the shadow of time and the decay of memory as it reassumed in his mind a transcendent and luminous wholeness. It was as though it contained a life of its own, and now having been summoned up, it was insisting upon making its presence known against all that opposed it—the times, the policeman, the pulsating crowd, even his own memory’s resistance toward recognizing its resurrection in the grotesque and incongruous details of the cross-eyed woman’s condition.