“You be sure to call me when y’all get back home,” Miss Martha said. “You got the number. And don’t worry ’bout paying for no groceries. You can catch me next time.”
When Geoff returned to the apartment that evening, he was breathing hard. For two days, there were sirens and screaming outside and lights flashing through the curtains. Belle called the store, worried.
“Miss Martha, you all right?”
“Child, yes. The windows got busted, but I put up some boards. I’m upstairs, listening to the radio.”
“I don’t like you being alone over there. I’ma send Geoff around.”
“You leave that man alone. I got my shotgun in case somebody try to mess with me. And I done seen worse with the Ku Kluxers back home. At least ain’t nobody hanging from that telephone pole ’cross the street. Thank you, Father God.”
“All right, then. But I’ma check back on you.”
After she hung up, Belle remembered her sister-in-law, and when the girl answered the phone, she ordered her not to leave her studio. “Do you hear me, Diane? Don’t make me pack up this baby and come sit on you.”
“That’s not much of a threat, Belle. You don’t even weigh a hundred pounds.”
“I weigh one hundred and ten, for your information.”
“Oh my goodness. Excuse me, fatso.”
By the end of the week, the neighborhood had calmed, and Diane showed for dinner. But this time, she brought company: Lawrence. They sat closely at the kitchen table, laughing at inside jokes while the other couple cut eyes at each other.
When her sister-in-law called the next morning, Belle was chilly: “Hey yourself.”
“You think worse of me, don’t you? I could tell at dinner.”
“You said you thought Lawrence cheated on you. Now, if you want to be a fool like in some Aretha song, that’s your business.” Belle wanted to punish her sister-in-law. She’d gotten used to one set of circumstances, and now she was being forced to adapt.
“Everybody can’t be as tough as you.”
“I’m not, Diane. I just have me some pride, and clearly, you don’t.”
“That’s a really, really shitty thing to say.”
Diane hung up, but the next day, Belle called to apologize.
There was much news that winter. The reconciliation of her in-laws stuck, and Belle found out she was pregnant again. At first, she concealed the news from her husband, and didn’t answer his concern over her new crying jags. She told him only when she’d broken down and tried down-home methods, which didn’t work; scalding-hot baths and cups of fresh ginger tea did not bring on her bleeding. But Geoff was so happy, as he’d been with the first pregnancy. She remembered that night in the field when he placed his hand on her stomach. Only twenty-three, but Geoff already believed he could work miracles.
When Belle thought she might be showing, she sent him alone to Sunday dinner at her in-laws’。 She was too tired. That’s what she said, but really, she didn’t want to face her husband’s mother. Her diaphragm had failed her, and she was barely holding on. But soon, Belle’s fears wouldn’t matter. In her third month, she miscarried.
Belle hadn’t wanted the new baby, but when she sat on the toilet that early morning and the large red clump dropped from her, followed by slick blood, she stayed on the toilet and wept for an hour, until Lydia awakened, making her hungry sounds.
*
In April, Uncle Root called. He had on his funereal voice, with many clearings of the throat, and Belle knew that somebody was dead. She walked backward until her foot found a chair, and when her great-uncle revealed that Martin Luther King Jr. had been murdered, she said “no” repeatedly, sucking up her tears.
Uncle Root told her the story about when he had met the minister. He’d heard the young man was speaking in Atlanta. Uncle Root had lost his wife, and it had made him reckless, the way Death could wiggle his square toes. Reckless because his college president had begun to send out warnings on official letterhead that any faculty member suspected of involvement in “civil agitation” would be summarily fired. But without telling anyone—even his family members—Uncle Root drove to Atlanta anyway and sat in the pews of Ebenezer Baptist Church, where Dr. King’s sermon gave him new life. Afterward Uncle Root felt optimistic about getting older: the world was in smoother, better hands, and in 1963, he attended the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. Before he drove his car north for the march, he told Belle and everybody else on campus he was going. He knew he was openly defying the orders of the president of Routledge College, and he no longer cared. The man was a hopeless toady to white people, and if Uncle Root was fired because his boss wanted to lick the boots of segregationists, so be it. Uncle Root had some money saved for the uncertain future; for the time being, he was going to enjoy himself, like a hardworking Negro man should.