WELL, WE GO UP TO THE ENTRANCE OF THAT OLD FOLK’S HOME, and there’s palm trees ’bout everywhere and the color pink. Lots of it. My stomach feels ill the second I step in the door Retta’s holding open for me. I cut my eyes at her sideways-like—Don’t you mess with me, missy—and then we walk on up to the desk.
While we wait for this lady to get off the telephone, I’m looking for the quickest way out. I make note of all the red exit signs and keep my legs jiggling and loose in case I need to make a run for it.
The first place we go is the cafeteria which ain’t good a’tall. I can’t eat, but I stick some biscuits and gravy on my plate and push ’em around to keep Retta quiet. They ain’t nothing like how I can make ’em at home. Retta tries to buy me an ice cream cone, too, but I tell her no. Then this white lady in a pink uniform walks us ’round the place, pointing to all the stuff there is to do.
We come to a room with a couple television sets and board games set out—and a baby gate in the doorframe! I ain’t lying! “Here’s where we have arts and crafts classes every Tuesday and Thursday,” she says. She’s yelling and just a-waving her arms at me like I’m deaf or something. There’s wheelchairs every which-away and they’s all lined up, eyes on that gate. The lady slips us through that gate and half of ’em try to escape, rolling this way and that and scrapping with each other. When I slip back out fast as I can this one lady gets to cursing me like a sailor. Child, I ain’t never seen nothing like this old folks’ jail!
We go outside in the fresh air and the lady says, “Out here’s the courtyard where you can take a nice stroll or sit under the oak tree and read a nice book.” An old glassy-eyed man looks up at me real slow from the bench he’s sitting on. Has his hand resting on his walker, and it seems like he just woke up. I tell you the truth, there’s a piece of drool ’bout to slip right out o’ his mouth! And if that white woman says one more thing is “nice” ’bout this place, now I know I’m gonna have me a fit!
After while we finish up the tour, and boy am I surprised when Henrietta lets me leave. Just like that. Real quiet-like. She don’t try to hold me there or nothing, ’course I figure that’s coming later. She drives me on back to Mount Pleasant just like she said she would, but it’s plain as day to me: Henrietta don’t want to help her old mama. She’s just ready to get me out the way.
“EJ’s got his own life now,” she says. “He’s a young man and needs to be spending time with people his own age instead of hauling you back and forth to your little stand every day.” My ears are getting hot like fire. Think steam might be coming out any time now, but I hold my tongue just so I can get back faster.
Three, four years ago I gave EJ that old brown station wagon I was driving, the same one Daddy Jim used to crawl around town in and carry back the fish he caught over there in Shem Creek. EJ was real grateful. Comes over every morning to pick me up and then carries me home every night too. He even picks up groceries for me when the milk and eggs is low, seeing as it’s right on his way. Oh sure now, he complains some just like any twenty-year-old’s gonna with prettier people to see and better things to do, but deep down EJ’s a good boy. Don’t know how he come from his mama, no sir. ’Course, as far as that goes, don’t know how she come from me neither.
Henrietta tells him he a-wasting his time—that I can find somebody else to come and do my bidding for me. He don’t tell me that, but I know that’s what she says to him. She offered to buy him a nice little sports car, too, if he’d quit shuffling me around town. Can you believe that? Now I know EJ wanted that car bad, but he must ’a said something smarty to her ’bout me ’cause he’s still driving that sad ol’ wagon this very day. He tells me it’s all right though. Says it makes him feel close to his granddaddy, ’cause Jim used to take him fishing in it most every weekend he was alive. Jim and EJ, they was real tight, but I still see him eyeing them pretty cars whizzing by us all the time. Makes me sad what that boy give up for me.
EJ’s short for Edmund James; he’s named after his daddy. By the grace of God, Retta married a pretty nice man, one of them White brothers from West Ashley. Not white like white folk but White like his name is: Edmund White. Yes sir, Eddie’s a nice enough fella—I like to call him Eddie, anyways—Henrietta says, “His name is Edmund, Mother,” and she’s all higher-than-me when she says it too.
Henrietta and Eddie live over there west of the Ashley River in a real fine house. Got two stories and a whole lot of space—more than enough for a big ol’ family, even though it’s just the three of ’em living there. I imagine if she really wanted, she’d find a spare room for me there too.
Eddie’s mama and daddy are pretty well off so I s’pose that’s why he is. Henrietta likes to spend Christmas and Thanksgiving and such over at the White house with the big turkey and all the trimmings. Can’t say as I blame her much for that. There ain’t enough space at my house for a big get-together, what with my two bedrooms, living room, and little ol’ kitchen.
When EJ was just a young’un, Henrietta got herself a job working in an office. That just made her even harder to be around. I reckon she figures she’s all high-fallootin’ now with some big job, thinking she’s all better than everybody else and treating ’em that way too. ’Specially me, her own mama.
“I just can’t believe you go out and sit on the side of the road in that—that shack!” she told me after EJ built my stand for me and was so proud and all.
“Now listen here,” I told her, “don’t you talk to your mama like that! Basket makin’s in my blood. It’s in yours, too, and you’d know it if you weren’t so ashamed of where you come from. I may not have me a lot of money like you White folks do, but I got everything I need, sure ’nough. The good Lord done provided for me, yes ma’am. Just can’t figure out how come He give me a ungrateful daughter like you, is all.”
Henrietta says that Sunnydale Farms is “a nice new place to make some friends my own age,” but I ain’t born yesterday. I know better. There ain’t an able-bodied soul living there, what with the wheelchairs crawling up and down the hallway and the smell o’ alcohol everywhere. And when she brings me back to my stand, I ain’t never been so happy to see my baskets in all my life.
Or Daddy Jim.
I don’t know why, but Jim don’t like to come home with me to our house on Rifle Range Road. Not sure if it’s the window trims painted blue to keep the haints out or not. Don’t see why that would matter none, seeing as he ain’t no haint. Probably a good thing he don’t come home, come to think of it, ’cause they’s lots of days I just feel like staying in bed when my rheumatism starts acting up. Thinking about seeing Daddy Jim’s what makes me get out of bed.
Sitting there with the traffic rolling by, I’m telling Jim all about my trip to the old folks’ home and trying to keep from tearing up.
“Jim, what I’m gonna do?” I ask him. “Things is fallin’ in all over me. I got a heap of money I can’t pay which means I’m gonna lose our house—the very house you and me lived in—and I can’t do nothin’ about it. And Henrietta’s just itchin’ to stick me in that nursin’ home. You should a’ seen her all ‘Mama look at this’ and ‘Ain’t this nice, Mama.’ ”
Jim don’t say nothing. He just looks out at the cars flying by.
“Jim,” I say. “Jim, say somethin’. You know what this means? I ain’t gonna be able to come out here and weave no more. You just gonna have to come to Sunnydale Farms with me.”
He don’t say nothing again.
“James Furlow Jenkins, you are gonna come with me, right?” My stomach’s knotting up ’cause he stays real quiet. If he was solid, I’d a-pop him on the leg. But since he ain’t, I just got to wait for him to feel like talking again.
“What you doin’, Mama?” he asks me finally. Now I’m the quiet one ’cause I’m holding my breath, wondering what he’s gonna say. “What are you really doin’ anymore, Mama? Henrietta ain’t got the time of day for you, and pretty soon, EJ ain’t gonna have time for you neither. And what you gonna do in a nursin’ home? You can’t do your baskets no more.”
“But I’ll still have you, Daddy, right? ’Cause you gonna be with me. You ain’t gonna make me go to the home all alone, are you?”
“I ain’t goin’,” he says, just like that. “You gonna have to go on alone.”
Telling you this now probably don’t hit you like it hit me, but hearing Jim say he ain’t gonna be with me no more was too much for me to stand. I done lost him once, and I can’t do it again. Jim’s my life—all of it, pretty much, ’cept for EJ and my sweetgrass baskets. Without Jim here with me, I just don’t see how I can take one more day on God’s green earth.