“Tomorrow is payday, Civil. I got rent to pay.” She folded her arms across her chest.
“So you going to shoot up those people with that drug all because of some rent money?”
“Hey, stop acting like that.” She turned to me. “I’m trying to do right, just like you.”
“Then don’t go back there, Alicia. Please.”
“I’m sorry, Civil, I can’t live up to your high-and-mighty expectations. You ever stop to think about all the pressure you put on yourself? This ain’t your fault.”
“Are you taking me to the apartments or not?”
* * *
? ? ?
BY THE TIME Alicia dropped me off, the sun had slumped into the horizon, and the light in the entryway to the Williamses’ apartment was not working. Although some of the apartments were still under construction, more families moved in each week. A group of kids played tag near a white cat napping in the grass. Two men sat on a bench listening to a radio playing in a parked car. Life at Dixie Court had not stopped just because the girls had been violated. I wondered how quickly word traveled among these buildings and considered, with real heaviness on my heart, how folks managed the constant barrage of bad news.
I knocked on the door. I had not seen any of them since the day I’d found out about the surgery, and I knew it was presumptuous of me to stop by unannounced. Someone yelled “Come on in!” but when I entered, the living room was empty. I walked straight to the girls’ bedroom. Erica lay on the bed peeling an orange, the ripped skin scattered across a napkin.
“How you feeling?”
She nodded, and I hoped that was a “fine.”
“Y’all need anything?”
Erica handed over half her orange to her sister. India sat back on the bed, pillows propped behind her back. Both girls wore pajamas.
“They had ice cream in the hospital,” Erica said without looking up at me. I didn’t know what to say. I couldn’t tell if it was a real request for ice cream or a statement to get rid of me. I didn’t have my car with me, but there was a corner market within walking distance.
I found Mrs. Williams sitting in her chair in the living room with a crochet hook in her hand. “Y’all got any ice cream?” I asked her.
“You know, I’m surprised I remember how to do this. I haven’t picked up a hook in years.”
“Nice color.” I pointed to the ball of pink yarn unraveling on the floor around her feet.
“They give it to us over at the senior center. I picked up the yarn, made a loop, and the next thing I know, I’m making up a granny square. My mama taught me. Her name was Ella. Ella Mae. She used to make these big old blankets that we would lay across the foot of the bed. They was the most beautiful thing you ever seen, and when you slept under them they smelled like the peppermint oil she rubbed on her hands. She was talented with the needle, yes sir. Could sew anything you set your eyes on. But what she really liked was the slip of yarn between her fingers. She never said as much, but you could tell. She could do it with her eyes closed.”
The veins of her hands flexed as she moved the hook over and under the yarn. I moved to the end of the couch so I could better see.
“For as long as I can remember, the women in my family have made the best life they knew how. I bet when you first come out to the house on old man Adair’s place, you thought I was a nasty woman.”
“No, I never thought that.”
“You thought something. I saw it on your face. You looked around that house like it wasn’t fit for a mule. And you know what? You was right. You ain’t never lived in a one-room house with a dirt floor, nasty dogs, and the white man walking all up in there in his work boots without so much as a knock. That house wasn’t never mine. Just a way station where we was stopping on our way to someplace else. Only the train never come, and so we was left sitting there on that platform waiting for near about three years.”
She wrapped the loose yarn around an index finger.
“You ain’t interested in the ramblings of an old woman like me. I guess I just wanted to say to you that when you got us this apartment, I felt something like hope, something I ain’t felt in a long time. You know, I married Ernest T. Williams when I was eighteen years old. My husband promised me a better life. Every month, he brung home his money and put it in my hand. He would say, Don’t you ever get no ideas about me out there in them streets. You the only woman ever hug this neck. Then he died and left me. Just out of the blue, he had the nerve to go and die on me. Just like Mace wife died on him. Second time death knocked on my door near about destroyed me. I told the Lord to just go ahead and send for me.”
She stopped to wipe her nose with a tissue, then picked her needle back up. “So you come along and get us this here apartment, and the first night I slept in that bed in that back room, I dreamed my Ernest was still alive. We was living here together—me, him, Mace, the girls. Then somebody come and take it all away. Faceless people. Like ghosts but not ghosts. When I tried to stop them, they shouted words at us. Ugly words. I woke up scared. Every night since, I been expecting a knock at the door.”
“Nobody’s coming to take anything away from you, Mrs. Williams.”
“No, that’s where you wrong. They can always take it away. It ain’t yours, Miss Civil. None of this.” She waved a hand at the air, dropping the yarn. “Don’t you know that? Ain’t nobody ever taught you what they can take? They just take take take.”
The room dimmed, as if somebody had turned off a lamp. It became so quiet, I could hear the wind surging. I thought vaguely of the ice cream the girls had requested. I thought of other things I could buy, things I could gift. A radio. Clothes. Shoes. A toaster for the kitchen.
She spoke her next words in a whisper. “I know you thought less of me living out there in that shack, and I didn’t think so much of you neither, tell the truth.”
“And now?” Please, I wanted to say. Give it to me. I hadn’t known I needed her forgiveness, but my heart longed for it.
“Now I know the world exactly what I thought it was,” she said and cast her eyes downward.
TWENTY-THREE
We went to church all the time when I was growing up, but by the time I reached high school we had fallen off the wagon and begun the Easter–Christmas–New Year’s Eve circuit. In college I learned some words I had not comprehended before. Agnostic. Atheist. Our family was none of these. We were just irregular churchgoing Christians, though I had never been the kind of Christian to pray for intercession on behalf of my own desires. I was more of the gratitude-prayer type. Thank you for this food. Thank you for my family. Thank you for the roof over my head.
When I had the abortion I asked God for something—really asked, for the first time in my life. I asked for forgiveness. And though I did everything to put out of my mind that painful day of lying on a bed in a strange woman’s house, I could not forget. It wasn’t so much that I regretted it. I never doubted it was the right decision for me. It was that I had been raised to believe that such a thing was a sin. And that kind of upbringing was hard to shake.
The Roe v. Wade decision had come down on a Monday in January of 1973, and I remember the afternoon newspapers sold out as word spread. I watched my daddy sit down in his chair and silently read, shake his head and then leave the paper on the coffee table. We never discussed it, but surely he knew that there were houses out in the country where women went to have the procedure, even before the ruling. I’d gone to one in Opelika, one where Miss Pope believed I could get safe care. And it had still been a risk. Surely Daddy understood that women needed a trustworthy place. Some women traveled to New York to have the procedure, but that was too far for most of us. Make no mistake about it, that ruling was a big deal.