Fern and I waited scrunched up into each other in the hallway like spies. It was the first time in too long a while that Fern let me near her. We could hear Cecile and Big Ma exchanging words. I mostly heard Cecile’s voice. She wasn’t screaming and acting crazy like I feared she would. When we heard her heavy footsteps, we ran out of the hall. As soon as Cecile passed to go to the bathroom, I went in to see that Big Ma was all right.
Big Ma was beating the yolkiness out of the few eggs our hens managed to lay. The hens hadn’t been laying the same since the tornado, but today was the first day we collected nearly a dozen. Mr. Lucas said they’d be back to themselves once the chicken run and the nesting boxes were replaced.
I helped Big Ma make breakfast while she muttered angry words about my mother being in the house she was born in and how her own mother called Cecile “daughter” and took Cecile’s side over hers.
I don’t know how Uncle Darnell got my mother back in the house, talking to Big Ma, and then sitting at the table, but there she was, ready to eat and unbothered by Big Ma, who was still muttering and serving.
I brought out a pitcher of orange juice then took my place next to Fern, who sat practically under Cecile, and Cecile let her. Uncle D sat between Cecile and Ma Charles, and Ma Charles and Miss Trotter sat together and allowed no one between them at the table. Even when they fussed with each other, they fussed side by side. JimmyTrotter sat to my right, next to Mr. Lucas, who sat next to an empty seat that he patted each time Big Ma entered carrying a platter. Big Ma refused her seat next to him each time.
Finally, Big Ma stopped muttering and spoke her mind. “I won’t sit at that table and I won’t ask the Lord to bless it. No, sir. Surely won’t.”
“If you won’t ask the Lord to bless it, I will,” Ma Charles said. My great-grandmother, showing off for her sister and for my mother, said a short prayer for my mother for having made the journey, for Pa and Mrs. still traveling on the road, and for Vonetta—“Whatever His will, be done.” Mr. Lucas was the first to “Amen” and Big Ma gave him a mean look, but he didn’t take it back or give her a look of apology. Mr. Lucas waited for her to fill his plate.
My mother made no expression. I knew she was hungry and intended to eat no matter who cooked the food. All the while Uncle D called her “sis” and poked her and chatted away with her. It turned out that the Black Panthers at the People’s Center had taken up a collection for Cecile to fly down here. Now she’d have to print flyers for them with her kitchen printer “from now until forever.” But she shrugged like it was nothing, and my mother didn’t like owing anyone anything.
Since Fern had so little on her plate, Big Ma came around with the meat platter and dropped a piece of ham and a strip of bacon before her. Fern lifted her turtle head and pushed the meat to the rim of her plate.
“Keep that up,” Big Ma threatened.
“Fern don’t eat meat,” I told Cecile.
“Why’s that?” Cecile asked Fern. “Your teeth hurting?”
Fern shook her head no. Then Cecile said, “Enough people in the world trying to silence us. Girl, you better speak up.”
Both Ma Charles and Miss Trotter liked that and took turns mimicking Cecile’s words.
Fern gave Cecile a look I didn’t think she should give, but she did. She picked up her fork and tapped it against her plate. Tapped it in the same rhythm she would have banged her fists at her sides. Fern rested her fork and cleared her throat.
Wilbur’s locked up in a pen.
Bambi’s mother’s roasting
Round and around and around
She goes
On whose plate
Nobody knows.
The people eat
Dead bacon meat
The people sing,
“We offed the pig,
We offed the pig.”
The people eat and sing.
She bowed her head and said, “A poem by Afua.”
Uncle Darnell and JimmyTrotter snapped their fingers. I followed and Cecile put her fork down for a second to snap fingers on both hands. Miss Trotter banged her fork against her plate and so did Ma Charles.
“Go on, Rickets,” Ma Charles said. “You’re nothing but bones, a big head, and big eyes, but you can sure say some words.”
“Mighty tasty words,” Miss Trotter added. “Hungry for some barbecue.”
“You have a conscience,” Cecile told Fern. “I don’t have much of a conscience where food is concerned, especially when I’m hungry.” She took the pieces of ham and bacon from Fern’s plate. Cecile didn’t eat pork as a rule, but gobbled the meat and looked to Uncle Darnell’s plate for more. My mother wasn’t Jewish or Muslim, like some of my friends at school, who didn’t eat pork at all. Cecile was just hungry.
I tried not to stare at my mother but there was no corner of my eye that didn’t see her. I thought I was beginning to know my mother, but I couldn’t figure her out. I thought she would give Big Ma a crazy piece of her mind, but she let Big Ma say what she wanted to say, and she just sat there quietly, eating and looking for more food. I waited for something to happen. It was a relief that Miss Trotter was in a talkative mood.
“She surely does favor them,” Miss Trotter said, studying my mother. “Favor all three.”
“Surely does,” Ma Charles said. “And strong, too! Tell ’em how far you walked, daughter,” she said to my mother.
“Got a lift from the airport as far as the junction.”
“Hear that? All the way from the junction,” Ma Charles said, exaggerating her astonishment. She turned to Uncle Darnell. “What’s that, son? Five, six miles?”
“About that,” Uncle Darnell said.
“Strong, I tell you,” Ma Charles said. “Where your people from, daughter?”
“That’s not your daughter!” Big Ma said.
“Mama didn’t mean—” Mr. Lucas started. But Big Ma said, “I don’t care what she meant. I care what she says.”
“Oh, hush,” Ma Charles said.
If my mother was a little tickled it came out in her eyes but nowhere else on her face. She said, “Mississippi,” with a forkful of food in her mouth without spitting out a bit. She finished chewing and swallowing and said, “My mother’s people are from Mississippi. My father, St. Louis.”
Both Ma Charles and Miss Trotter nodded, especially to the St. Louis part, like she had said, “Paris, France.”
“She looks about Creek, like Papa’s people,” Miss Trotter said. JimmyTrotter gave me a wink. “Maybe Choctaw.”
“She look more like my mother’s people,” Ma Charles said, which was her way of saying “plain old Negro.”
“She ain’t nothing to us,” Big Ma said.
Cecile gave Big Ma—who seemed to want to fight—no reaction, although she seemed amused by Ma Charles and Miss Trotter each claiming her.
It was the first time I heard where my mother’s family had come from. My sisters and I, we weren’t just Trotters, Charleses, Gaithers, and Johnsons. We were pieces of other families we’d never know or see.
“Strong like my people,” Ma Charles said. “Done give me these greats. All three of them.”
And no one said anything. We were missing Vonetta.
Big Ma said, “Strong is sticking around. Raising ’em. Loving them. Not just dropping them like an animal in the woods.”
I waited for it to come. Waited for the dark cloud. Waited for my mother to say the kind of thing that only Cecile would say. I sat there afraid to swallow. But Cecile said nothing. Not one word.
“You’re here, daughter,” Ma Charles told my mother. “As sure as you’re a mother I knew you’d come. I knew it.” She said to Fern, “Rickets, go get my tambourine.”
“No shaking that tambourine at the table,” Big Ma said.
“Go on ’n get it, Rickets. You know where I keep it. Go on.”
Fern went flying through the house in search of Ma Charles’s tambourine.
Ma Charles said, “My Henry and I had pigs. A pen full. Remember, son?” Mr. Lucas yessed her. “Other folks left their families or jumped out the window during hard times. We had a horse for fertilizer, pigs, chickens, a garden, and the creek overflowed with fish. We didn’t know a thing about starvation.”
The um-hmms went around from Miss Trotter, Mr. Lucas, my uncle. Even my mother nodded.
“Oh, yes. We had pigs a-plenty, but someone left the pen open.”
“Ma,” Big Ma said.
Ma Charles went on telling her tale. “All them pigs gone, and it was a hungry winter.”
“An unkind winter, as I remember it,” Miss Trotter added.
“Not just for every Trotter and Charles, but for everyone around here. We weren’t the only ones depending on our small living.” She said to Big Ma, “You got worse from me and then some when I finished with you. Might have been a hard winter, but what is a hog when you don’t have your child?”
“Child, child, child,” Miss Trotter said.
Fern returned with the tambourine.