The door opened for Miriam just as she reached to turn the knob. Miss Dawn stood before her, resplendent in a long batik housedress the color of a thousand rubies. Her head was wrapped in a matching scarf.
“Don’t you worry your mama with a thousand questions today, you hear?” she said, ushering Miriam into the warm house. “Your sister’s down for a nap now, too, and today is not the day to go waking her up.”
Inside the wallpapered parlor, Miriam saw many of the neighborhood women she knew and others she did not. Most were weeping. Miriam could tell by the smoke coming from the back of the house, and by the sound of deeper voices there, that men were chain-smoking in the kitchen. Unlike most of the political meetings that occurred at the house, this one seemed muted, melancholy.
“What kind of questions?” Miriam asked.
“You already doing it,” Miss Dawn whispered.
“Why won’t you tell me what’s going on?” Miriam persisted. “Why isn’t the record player on? Who are all these people? Why is everyone so upset?”
“She don’t know?”
Miriam heard her mother’s voice. She sounded weak, like a hurt bird. “Mama?” She scanned the parlor until she found her mother, perched on the piano stool. She had been obscured by a crowd of women holding handkerchiefs to their faces.
“You don’t know?” Hazel said.
“Know what? You know I stay late on Thursdays for piano.”
“Ah yes,” her mother said. “I forgot.”
There were whispers among the women in the front room. Miss Jade, wearing a houndstooth coat and a tall beehive, cried out, “Lord, what we going to do now?”
“It’s the end of the world,” said another woman in response.
Another groaned.
“Mama?” Miriam’s voice was pleading.
Miriam saw a flash of ruby. Miss Dawn was by her side again, the hem of her housedress sweeping the room’s Persian rug. She looked like a beating heart there in the dim room. She went to the large bay window.
“I should have known,” she said, her back to the room.
“Should have known what?” Miriam asked.
“There be stories of a cold settling in when an old king dies,” Miss Dawn declared, staring out the window. “Dr. King was shot.” Miss Dawn didn’t take her eyes from the window as she added, “And killed.”
“Shot down like a goddamned dog,” Miss Jade said.
Miriam’s mother did something foreign, especially in front of all the guests. She hung her head and cried.
Miriam stood frozen, her coat still on, feeling like the only person not moving in the entire room of women weeping, wailing, blowing their noses, and rubbing each other’s backs. Unwittingly, she found herself catapulted into a memory from five years before, when she was eight and August was just a newborn.
That morning, while August slept, her mother had awoken Miriam with her favorite meal: breakfast. Miriam found fried green tomatoes, shrimp and grits, fried salt pork, spicy scrambled eggs over rice, and buttery cornbread muffins to soak it up all laid out on the kitchen table.
Her mother had stood by the stove, watching Miriam eat. Her face, a stone wall.
Miriam, distracted by the smorgasbord in front of her, had not noticed her mother fill up the water jug. Suddenly, she’d felt cold water splash over her face and soak into her shirt.
She’d gasped, choking on the water, when a second unexpected thing happened: Her mother pushed her. Not too hard, but with enough force that Miriam rebounded against the green velvet cushions of the curved kitchen booth.
Miriam had propped herself back up and steadied herself for another blow.
Instead, her mother nodded. “You ready,” she had said.
Hazel took Miriam to her first sit-in that afternoon.
Four little girls had been blown up in a church that week, down in Birmingham. Hazel had pounded the kitchen counter as she told her daughter the news. Had to wear her hand in a bandage for a week.
Soaking wet and silent, her breakfast ruined, Miriam had understood.
Just as now, at twelve, Miriam saw, through the sea of bodies, the same wrath in her mother’s face as she had seen when those four girls were bombed and when Medgar died or whenever her father’s name was brought up.
In a rush, Miriam went to her mother, maneuvering between the other women’s stockinged legs like they were branches of a magnolia. She knelt at her mother’s feet. Reached up and cupped her mother’s face in her hands.
“Look at me, Mama. Go ahead. Look at me,” Miriam said, brushing away the foreign flowing tears. Her mother looked up and then into her daughter’s eyes.
“I got you,” Miriam said. It was both a declaration and an invitation.
Her mother’s face broke into a smile. She kissed Miriam’s forehead. Then she rested her head on top of Miriam’s. Closed her eyes.
“I got you,” Hazel repeated back.
CHAPTER 26
Joan
2001
When Daddy and my uncle Bird stepped fully into the parlor, Wolf cried. She lay on her back and showed Daddy her belly. He knelt to her then. I’d known it was him as soon as I heard Wolf whimper at the door. She made that soft cry for one person and one person only.
Uncle Bird’s voice was unmistakable. He had a sharp Chicago slant to his vowels. Ma. Pa. I had spent years listening to him and my dad talk on the phone long into the night, the both of them howling like hyenas. My father’s Chicago accent blossoming on those calls: mane instead of man.
Daddy wore his tan Marine Corps uniform, his cap in his hands. My uncle Bird, Daddy’s clone except a head shorter, wore a black leather jacket and balanced a toothpick between his pursed lips. Even though they stood before me, it was hard for me to register what I was seeing.
Six years. It had been six years since I had seen Daddy. Every time I thought of him, more often than I wanted to admit, I had pushed the memory away from me. Picked up a pencil. Lost myself on the page. But here he was, in front of me. And he looked so heartbreakingly familiar, down on one knee, rubbing our dog’s belly.
“Hey, girl,” he cooed. He glanced up at me.
It hurt to look at his smile.
We stared at each other for a long time. No words came; I didn’t smile back.
He shifted his focus to my mom, who stood in the parlor with her arms folded over each other. “So, you’re alive,” she said. Mama was cold rage. She glared at him. I suspect that if her eyes could have turned into bullets, she would have let them.
Uncle Bird walked over and kissed Mama, sheepishly, lightly, on the cheek. He took off his leather cap and held it in his hands, shuffled his feet. “It was hell getting here, Meer,” he said.
“I bet,” said my Auntie August. I could see that she still kept an eye on the Remington she’d left by the door.
Uncle Bird pointed his cap at Daddy, who was still stroking Wolf, but his eyes were trained on me and Mama. “And it was all because this nigga didn’t kill enough Hajis in the first damn war.”
“Don’t say that,” I snapped.
History had awakened me to the fact that racism is the only food Americans crave. Mornings in class with Mr. Harrison had taught me that Americans had reduced the world’s most elite soldiers to a single word: Jap. I had grown up hearing my father’s Marine friends, even Uncle Mazz, use Haji. I wasn’t having any of it in this house. I was prepared to deal with the fallout, the blowback of sassing an elder and kin, but—To hell with it, I thought. I wasn’t having any of that low ignorance up in my house. Especially not from him.