It was my parents’ whispering that woke me, summoning me from my dreams to face a drama that had begun to unfold while I slept. Their hushed, urgent tones pushed through the stagnant night air and penetrated the plank wall that separated their room from the one I shared with my younger brothers.
“Hurry up, Gene,” Momma hissed. Her whisper cracked, exposing a taut, serpentine voice. “This one’s different than the others. I can’t tell how much time I got.”
Fear rose in me. In the silvery darkness, I scanned the nooks of the room where I slept, trying to find a hiding place for my imagination. I looked into the dull shadow of the big ill-painted dresser where our clothes were kept; into the corner beside the rickety rocking chair that used to belong to our grandmother; at the foot of my bed beside the marred wooden trunk that had belonged to our great-grandmother; into the bed across the room from me where nine-year-old Roy Anthony and seven-year-old Earl slept. I listened to the adenoidal breathing of my two-year-old brother, June Bug, who slept beside me, his tiny dark head lolled in the folds of his pillow. I stared into the dark cave of his open mouth.
In the other room, Daddy mumbled something and the bedsprings on his and Momma’s bed sighed with relief. Daddy’s booted feet clumped across the wooden floor. The front door whined open, then shut, and Daddy was gone.
Momma moaned and began panting. It occurred to me that maybe she was about to have the baby that had been growing in her. I gazed at the ceiling and pictured her body, swollen big with the baby that had been riding low in her stomach for about a month now. “Babies move around,” she had said, irritated when I pointed out that her stomach looked different. When the baby was first growing there, her belly had been high and round like a volleyball. Now it looked more like a long smooth watermelon lying on its side.
“How come babies move around?” I prodded.
“Babies ain’t none of your business,” she told me, and refused to say any more. This was how it often was between us, her mouth closing down around certain secrets, her eyes warning me to move on to something else.
When each of my brothers was born, I had been sleeping, or at school, or someplace else out of the way. This had been fine with me since I had never been especially interested in knowing much about the arrival of babies. What I really wanted to know was why Momma kept bringing home brothers and no sisters.
The front door hinges whined again. “The taxicab will be here directly,” Daddy said, breathless. He had probably run out of the Quarters to the main street and the nearest pay telephone in front of Watkins’ Grocery Store a half mile away, then back home again. I imagined him standing in the doorway, sweaty but calm, puffing and holding his chest like I did when I was winded.
“What you think?” Daddy asked.
“You may as well gone get Maddy up. She big enough now. I can tell her what to do,” Momma answered.
The light from my parents’ room crept across my face as the door to my and the boys’ room opened. I closed my eyes and feigned sleep as Daddy tiptoed in. His shadow spread over me and June Bug. “Maddy,” he whispered, his voice sounding strangely hollow as he leaned over the bed. His breath, with its sweet metallic scent, brushed my cheek. “Maddy,” he said again, lifting my hand from the quilt and shaking it, as if he were introducing me to something.
I groaned and tried to turn away from him. The dry emotions I sensed in the folds of his voice and the desperate pressure of his fingers on my hand made me uneasy. I didn’t want any part of whatever it was Momma thought I was big enough for now.
“Maddy, we need you to get up,” Daddy said, squeezing my fingers more aggressively in his calloused palms. “Come on now. Get on up. Your momma needs you.”
My heart beat wildly in my ears, as I sat up, crawled out of bed, and followed him into their room.
Momma sat on the edge of their bed wearing a green spaghetti-strapped summer dress with tiny yellow flowers on it. She had always warned me against wearing summer clothes after the first frost, yet here she sat on a chilly October night, dressed for summer.
Momma’s coarse black hair was pulled back into a nappy pony-tail at the base of her neck. The harsh glare of the bare lightbulb hanging from the ceiling made the tiny beads of sweat on her forehead sparkle like jewels against her dark skin. Her face was puffed and swollen and she was hunched forward over the baby in her belly. She looked up at me with fierce, almost angry eyes.
“Maddy, I’m fixing to go to the hospital,” she said, reaching toward me.
I went to her reluctantly, afraid of the fierceness. Her cold damp hands clutched mine as I faced her. I bit the inside of my cheek when she trembled and squeezed my fingers in a crab-like grip. She shut her eyes and bent forward over her stomach again. Her cheeks quivered and she growled low in her throat then began panting, and I figured that the baby was tearing at her from inside.
My twelve-year-old friend Esther had told me that babies tore through their mothers’ flesh when they were ready to be born. “The mamas scream and holler and they bleed like pigs on killing day,” she had said with the air of authority. I had listened, certain it was one of her many lies. “That’s why ladies have to stay in the hospital so long after they have a baby,” she continued. “They have to get sewed back together. When they gets home you can see the lines on they stomachs where the skin growed back together.”
Back in the middle of summer when the weather was right for Momma’s spaghetti-strapped dress, Esther had extracted a promise from me. “Let’s swear we ain’t never going to have no babies,” she demanded. We sat in the breezy shade of a weeping willow tree near the Harvest Quarters creek and went so far as to make a blood and spit pact to seal the agreement. I allowed her to prick the palm of my right hand with the hungry point of a pin. I watched the tiny crimson bubble of life rise, anxious to cover the hole the pin had made in the middle of my palm, while she pricked her own palm. Then we spit in our left palms and stared at each other, awed by the power of the ritual we had set in motion. Esther crossed her arms at the elbows and extended her hands toward me. “You too,” she said. “Now gimme.” I reached out, clasping her hands, my right palm to her right palm, my left palm to her left palm. “Blood to blood, water to water …,” she intoned and closed her eyes, shutting me out of the darkness and desperation that made her so hateful toward her future.
“Are you listening to me, Maddy?” Momma’s voice cut into my remembering. Her eyes were like shiny black and white marbles. “Sorry, sugar,” she said, shaking my hands. “Don’t look so scared. Everything is going to be fine. Daddy’s about to take me to the hospital so I can deliver this new baby. You big enough to help out now and I need you to look out after the boys, ’specially tonight and tomorrow morning till your daddy gets back home. You going to need to help him and Mother Parker take care of the boys till I get back home in a week.”
I glanced back at Daddy. He stood in the doorway, shoulders slumped, hands thrust deep into his pockets. He nodded.
“Every day after Daddy goes to work, you gone need to make sure the boys eat something,” she continued. “Make sure Roy and Earl wash their faces and comb they heads and put on good school clothes. Take June Bug to Mother Parker’s before y’all go on to school. Then come straight home like always, pick up Junie Boy and wait for your Daddy. You hear me? Take care of your brothers. Keep them out of harm’s way. Promise me you’ll do that, Maddy.”
Momma’s fingernails dug into my palms as if she and I were making a pact like Esther and I had done. Momma’s eyelids narrowed and fluttered, her jaw and lips clenched, and she arched her