“I wanted to ask for your help,” I said.
“With what?”
“With what I’m trying to do.”
“Is this job your dream, Civil?”
Mama had asked me a version of this question for as long as I could remember. When I’d struggled to choose between Tuskegee, from where Daddy had graduated, or Mama’s beloved Fisk, she’d asked me, “Is it your dream to go to Tuskegee, Civil?” In the fourth grade, I’d won the spelling bee at my elementary school, and Daddy insisted on testing the city’s segregation laws by registering me for the citywide bee. As we were leaving the registration area in City Hall, a white boy spit on my shoes and pretended it was an accident. The night before the bee, I threw up twice. The next morning, as I sat in the kitchen eating my cereal, Mama asked me, “Is it your dream to go to that spelling bee?” Actually, it had been my dream, but I didn’t tell her that. I told her no, and she agreed to let me skip it.
“I do love nursing,” I said slowly.
“That’s good.”
“My question is . . . how do I get them this apartment? Do you know anyone who can help me get them into public housing?”
“One of the women in the Links is on the board of the new Dixie Court development. You want me to talk to her?”
“Could you?” I moved to touch her. She seemed to sense the movement on my part because she stepped to the side and grabbed a brush.
“Remind me tomorrow. I’m so forgetful these days.”
“Okay, Mama, I will.”
I watched her work. I wanted to spend just a few moments longer with her. Even distracted, Mama had presence. Being around her was like standing in the glow of a candle. “I like that yellow.”
She looked over at the canvas. “Yes, it did come out nice, didn’t it?”
TEN
The following Sunday, I finally accepted Ty’s invitation and joined the Ralseys for dinner. Alicia had been over to Ty’s house twice for Sunday dinner since meeting him, and even though I had been the one to suggest it, I didn’t like it. Surely he wouldn’t be so low-down as to date one of my friends. I hadn’t told Alicia about my history with Ty, so I couldn’t blame her. As I sat across from the two of them, I quietly sorted through my feelings.
Just like me and most other folks around our age in Montgomery, Ty still lived at home. More often than not, we went to college in Alabama because it had more Black campuses than any other state in the country. Talladega. Stillman. Selma. Miles. Oakwood. Tuskegee. The list went on. If we were fortunate enough to live on campus, we moved back home after we graduated or until we got a job or, sometimes, until we married. Before Ty impulsively asked me to marry him, I didn’t think he would ever settle down. He struck me as the kind of man to live with his parents for as long as he could.
Ty and his family lived in a three-bedroom bungalow filled with plants jammed into every conceivable space. The foliage turned the inside of the house into a garden, and Mr. Ralsey liked to walk around with a pair of scissors, snipping off dead leaves. In the middle of a conversation, he would reach over and poke his finger into the soil of the nearest pot. But it was Mrs. Ralsey who had the insatiable plant habit. Long after space had run out, she would come home on a Sunday with one more, searching for a shelf or table or counter where she could place it. When the time was right, Ty would take the plant out to the backyard and check to see if its roots had grown too big for the pot. He especially loved saving plants that looked like they were about to die. Ty was as tender with those plants as everyone else in his family.
Ty and I were both only children, and because we were born the same year, we had grown up together. I could remember him coming into my room once when we were around eleven years old to ask me if I knew the difference between a monocot and a dicot. I accused him of repeating words out of the encyclopedia in order to sound smart, and he got angry and called me a pickaninny. I stomped his toe and he ran off to tell his mama on me.
“Well, it’s so good to finally see you, Civil. I was beginning to worry you and Ty had a falling-out or something,” Mrs. Ralsey said to me after dinner.
I smiled nervously and glanced at Ty, wondering if he had told his parents we’d dated last year. Even if he hadn’t, Mrs. Ralsey might have figured it out. The woman was sharp as a tack. She was the only Black woman in town who had founded her own law firm. A few years before, her husband had left his job and joined her. At one time before Ty and I were born, Montgomery had only a few Black lawyers, and the Ralseys had been two of them.
It wasn’t just the plant hobby and her legal profession that made Mrs. Ralsey interesting. The woman was a cook among cooks. I am not playing with you when I say this woman could burn. She was so unlike my mother, who if anyone ever said she could burn, meant it literally.
“Let me get the dessert.” I jumped out of my chair before she could say anything else. Ty followed me into the kitchen.
I set a stack of bowls on the counter while Ty took the banana pudding from the refrigerator. Ty was the type to eat his pie with a spoon and his pudding with a fork. Scrape off the meringue. Pick the pecans off his pecan pie. Watching him, I suddenly wished I had not accepted Mrs. Ralsey’s dinner invitation. I gripped the edge of the counter to steady myself, but even the smooth fatness of my own hand reminded me of a baby’s knuckles.
In nursing school, I took comfort in my books. For the first two years, I didn’t date, and no one expressed any interest. I was not sure why no one asked me out. I knew a lot of them preferred light-skinned women, and I was on the darker side. I had my daddy’s nose, and that was what you might call an acquired taste. But I had some prized attributes as well. Heavyset with a cushiony tube around my middle, I had an attractive face—straight teeth, skin smooth enough not to require makeup—and big, pretty legs.
Three close friends of mine lived in my dorm, but by our third year they all had boyfriends and no time for me. That was right around the time Ty started visiting his fraternity brothers at Tuskegee on weekends. I danced with him at a party one night, and he kissed me in the darkness. It was the most natural kiss I’d ever had. Even though our relationship had been marked by sibling-like squabbles, when we finally did turn that corner into romance, it was easy. Maybe it was because we knew each other so well. He was a part of me and always had been. By spring semester of my senior year, I was pregnant.
“What do you think about Alicia?” I said suddenly.
“Why you ask me that?”
“Just wondering.”
“I see why you like her,” he said. “She’s got a good heart.”
“Yeah, she’s cool.” I had been the one to break things off with Ty, so I knew it shouldn’t matter to me what he thought about Alicia.
“Civil, we need to talk.”
“About what?”
He leaned against the counter. “You know about what.”
“What’s there to talk about?” I folded my arms across my chest.
He unhooked my hand and pulled me to him. “Have you told anybody?”
“Have you?”
“No.”
“Good, cause there’s nothing to tell.”
“That’s not true and you know it.”