Our house stood alone on a hill off Penyon Road, about half a mile outside the city limits. It was old, crippled, and diseased— an emblem of poverty and neglect. Nature had tried to cure it by embracing the rear frame with herbs, roots, and a jumble of foliage which spilled over from the surrounding woodland. Nature had failed, and in frustration she sought to destroy the house by eroding the very foundation on which it stood.
Erosion had left the house slanted at an odd angle, held up on the east side by thick, round poles lodged into tilted, unstable earth. Occasionally, huge chunks of brown earth shook loose, skirted around the poles, and rolled down the slope into a waiting gully.
All of my life home had been these three drafty rooms under the same rusted tin roof. The house swayed in the wind but stood. It absorbed its fill of rainwater and stood. It groaned under the weight of celebrations and sorrows and did not crumble. But for how much longer? I thought we might wake up one morning—or not wake up—in the rocky, muddy gully below. Or maybe we would simply blow across the dirt road and get lost in the overgrown field of weeds. I could not predict what would happen, but I feared we were destined for disaster.
Mama stood at the foot of thirteen sagging, rickety steps that led up to a wide, shaky porch. All pretense was over. She was gasping for breath as she placed one foot on the first step and began, gingerly, to climb. She had almost reached the top when her knees buckled. My arms shot out instinctively, ready to break her fall.
“Tara! Tarabelle!” I screamed.
“Be quiet!” Mama snapped, regaining her balance and resuming her climb. “Ain’t no need to wake the dead.”
The front door, which was as much cardboard as plywood, swung open and my sister, Tarabelle, appeared on the porch. “What is it?” she asked irritably. “Why you calling me like that?”
“Mama’s sick,” I answered breathlessly, my heart pounding in my chest.
Tarabelle was sixteen and almost as tall as Mama. She had long, jet black hair, a copper-colored complexion, and the cold, black eyes of a dead poker player. I had never seen the eyes of a dead person— in fact, I had never seen a poker game—but I had heard that poker faces were expressionless, and I knew that dead people showed no emotion. That was Tarabelle. She stepped back, regarded our mother with those cold black eyes. Her mouth twitched as if she might smile, but I knew better.
“She ain’t sick, ”Tarabelle said, still staring at Mama. “She ’bout ready to have that baby. That’s all.”
I had been ignorant in my innocence but I was wiser than my sister because I had learned to study Mama as diligently as I studied my books. I watched our mother as she squeezed the collar of her coat. I heard her sharp intake of breath. I saw frustration and pain leap from the core of her soul and surge the length of her arm, down to the delicate hand that struck my sister’s face.
The blow sent Tarabelle reeling back. She bounced off the porch wall and landed less than an inch from the drop that would have taken her down into the gully. She lay there, those cold, black eyes boring into the equally cold, gray eyes of our mother.
“I’m dying,” Mama said with calm finality.
Tarabelle gripped the splintered boards at the edge of the porch and nodded her head. “Yes, ma’am.”
Edna Pearl and Laura Gail, who were only four and five, stood in the doorway, staring in fascinated fright. I watched as Edna stole back into the shadowy gloom pierced intermittently by daylight filtering in through cracks in the walls. It was our only source of illumination until dusk, when we were allowed to light the kerosene lamps. I knew Edna had gone to alert Martha Jean to our mother’s presence.
My next eldest sibling, Martha Jean, was a defective replica of our mother. She could not hear and had never spoken one coherent sentence in her life. There but by the grace of God went I, for only eleven months separated her silent beauty from my articulate homeliness. My imagination ran rampant when I thought of our births. I would fantasize Martha Jean stubbornly refusing to leave our mother’s womb until I was conceived. We would blend together, and my thick nose would become thin; my coarse, tangled hair would become silky and straight, and I would have deep dimples in my cheeks. And, in turn, Martha Jean would be able to hear and speak. We would come rushing from the womb fused together, yelling at the top of our lungs, and no one would know that there were two of us. We would be smart, beautiful, and white, and Mama would love us with all of her heart.
Mama swept through the doorway of her castle and plopped down on her throne—the only bed in the house. Laura and Edna immediately knelt, removed her shoes, and began to rub her feet. Martha Jean brought in the customary cup of steaming water, and I produced the stolen papers of coffee and sugar from my pocket. Tarabelle, having pulled herself together, came to stand beside me.
“Mama, you want me to go get Miss Pearl?” she asked.
“No, I don’t want you to go get Pearl, ”Mama snapped. “I want you to get outta my sight, Tara. How the hell you gon’ go get Pearl when she at work way up there on Meadow Hill. I swear, I got the dumbest children in the world. Sometimes I wonder if all y’all belong to me.”
I wondered, too. Sometimes I even prayed there had been a mistake, and that somebody would come along, take my hand, and say, “Rozelle Quinn, I believe this child belongs to me.” Mama would push me into the arms of the stranger and say, “You’re right. I knew all along that she was your child, but I loved her so I just couldn’t bear to let her go. You take her, though, because she rightfully belongs to you.” I would go off to my new home where there would be a bed from the Griggs Furniture Store, a dress for every day of the week, a change of underpants, and two pairs of shoes with good hard-bottom soles. I would have an electric light to read by, and rows and rows of all sorts of great books.
Most of the books I read belong to the colored library, and the selection there wasn’t great, but I would read anything, even when I had to ask Mrs. Jordan, the librarian, to pronounce words for me. Winter months are bad for reading, but during the summer, I sat out on the porch, or in the woods behind the house, and read until God dimmed His lights and called it a day.
“Tangy Mae, don’t you hear me talking to you? ”Mama barked, and I jumped because I had not heard her. “I told you to write a letter to Mushy. ”That was my oldest sister. “She needs to know her mother is dying. And you go straight to the post office and mail it off. Take the dummy wit’ you and don’t y’all be gone long.”
The command was barely out of her mouth when she took a sip of coffee, gave a short cry, and doubled over in pain, as if she had been poisoned. Five of her nine children stood at her bedside watching and waiting.
She breathed in and out through pursed lips, then her eyelids fluttered and opened, and she turned glassy eyes on the five of us.
“You sick, Mama?” Laura asked. “You don’t feel good?”
Mama placed her coffee cup on the floor and gathered Laura and Edna in her arms. “It’s all right, baby,” she said. “Mama’s just dying, that’s all.”
“Humph.” Tarabelle snorted so quietly that only I could hear it.
“Tell the dummy to fetch the tub and warm me some bathwater,” Mama said. “I don’t intend to die smelling like a white woman’s kitchen.” She stretched out on the bed, settling Laura and Edna beside her, while I stood there miming a bath to my deaf sister.
It was uncanny the way Martha Jean understood the crude signs we dangled before her eyes. My hands had barely cleared my armpits before she was off to the yard with the water bucket. Tarabelle followed after her and returned shortly, carrying the round, tin bathtub by a single handle. She placed the tub on the floor at the foot of the bed.
I retreated to the front room. There I settled and wrote a most convincing letter of suffering, pain, and impending death. I begged Mushy to return to Penyon Road. Mushy, whose real name was Elizabeth Anne, had been gone for four years. One summer evening, just after her eighteenth birthday, she had left for Ohio. She had not returned, not even for a visit.
The house still mourned her absence. It had taken on a coldness that no amount of coal or kindling in the stoves or fireplace could penetrate. Life seemed to have drifted out through the chimney in gray whiffs of smoke. And yet, for some reason, we continued to exist.