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Endowment Arts & Letters Editorial Staff Learn about the MFA Program
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Respect
By: Margaret
Gibson |
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I. How strange they were, how fearsome, with their lidless yellow eyes, the fierce and accurate bobbing of their necks, the flounce of burnished tail feathers, the way each yellow foot lifted itself, flexed its nubbly toes, spread
them out and set them down in slow motion while the fury of their bobbing necks kept up a rapt staccato near my bare
toes. In the midst of them stood Edwin, no shirt, baggy overalls, holding a hen by the ankle part, her feet sticking out the back of a hand big as a baseball
mitt. Sun flashed off the head of the hatchet that hung in the rung of his
overalls. With his back turned, he was whistling! Whistling,
he didn’t have to see us, Betsy and me—why should he have to deal with Miss Doyle’s city girls? The
chicken, now a flapping squawk of feathers, grew quiet, stilled perhaps by Edwin’s gait, a lumbering that rolled over the earth and knew it round, a stolid rocking that took him over to the wide
stump of wood. I let myself be drawn there, coming near with my body, moving away in my
mind. In a motion so swift it was seamless, like light, down came naked arm, steel edge, and the weight of Edwin’s determination to give Aunt T what she’d asked for, Sunday dinner. All this met in the hen’s neck, which I knew from sucking one in was an interlocked lace of bones. Soundlessly, over into the wood dust went the hen’s head, the eye yellow with a jet black center, the beak hard
and bright. I held my breath, my sister let out an explosion of giggles, pointing—for there in the dust, released from Edwin’s grasp, the chicken’s body, headless, ran in swooping arcs about the wood yard, looking for its head. “Do another
one!” my sister demanded, delighted with the
dancing dead hen. “Miss T want two more hens for company Sunday,” Edwin said. He wouldn’t let us think he’d kill another one because two white girls from the city, who didn’t know what they were looking at, the difference between
life and death, had asked him. II. Marie, my mother used to say, had white blood—that’s why her skin was coffee with
milk. Edwin’s, she said, was coffee without sugar or milk, and that’s why he wanted nothing to do with any of us, why he stayed outside when Marie plucked the hens in a bucket of water hot as her hands could stand. I thought the palms of
her hands were pink because they’d faded in the scald of hot
water. Thought again—no, were that so, her
hands would be entirely pink. Edwin’s hands were light and dark, also the soles of his feet. Some things made no sense, and one of them was color. Head down, hunched over, Marie held the
bucket steady between her
knees. In hot water the red feathers turned dark brown, the yellow feet turned yellower. Once they were cooked, Marie would take them and suck them— she said they
were sweet. I never asked Marie for a suck.
Nor did she offer it. “The feet
is mine,” she said, and she could have them, sticking up like broken witches’ umbrellas, evil angles with curved spurs. Sweat kerneled on Marie’s forehead, slid down her neck into her dress where it darkened the seams around her shoulders. She grunted softly as she yanked, then looked
up. “Law, child, you gonna faint? Run along now, run along.” III. And I did, I ran. It would take
years before I’d see face to face on a city sidewalk during the march in D.C. a black man with a sign hung round his neck, words so simple and dignified and true, they stunned me. I am a man. Years more before that city black man blurred, and I saw Edwin there and wondered hard who he had been, and went back to Amelia, driving the curved country roads until I recognized the red dirt lane that led to their small cabin with the well
out back. Marie lived there, but I’d come too late—Edwin, she said, had gone home to God; her son Junior, home from a war with one arm and an empty sleeve pinned to his shirt, lived up north near one family or another of them, all her life, she laughed, voice high and shrill,
eyes bright. “Your sister,” she asked, “she still fat?” I wasn’t ready to talk about my sister, still stung by Marie’s reply when I said I’d come in my mother’s place. “No’m,” she’d
cried. “Ain’t nobody takes Miss Doyle’s place, nobody.” My face turned red as a beet in her garden—because hadn’t I wanted to be the
ambassador of better things? Hadn’t I wanted to supplant my mother, who’d still talk to me like this: “I’ve changed, you know. I went to Willemina’s funeral, afterwards right to her house. It was as clean as a white person’s!” IV. What Marie and I might have
been to each other, had I come without wanting from her something
I couldn’t yet give myself, I’ll never know. I couldn’t name it, then. I sat on the sofa and showed her pictures of my family. I asked questions until she laughed, “You one of them radicals?” She wiped her eyes, told me how back then, when my mother first came to board with Miss T and teach in the two room school house, no one had money, not even the white folks. “I’d
iron for the cook at the wood stove for Miss T, chop wood with Edwin at the saw
mill. It was that way.” Her voice settled on the words, and she didn’t say
anything for a while. Then, as a quickening wind turns leaves on their backsides before a storm, she started up again— Miss Mason, now there was a piece of work, didn’t I remember Miss Mason? Tiny woman, ate like a bird, pillar of the church? fine family? Well. On a day hot as fire, she said, there on her big porch was Miss Mason, calling Oh Marie, you
there, Marie! “I stopped, put my milk pail in the shade. Mrs. Garland had give me some fresh milk I had to get home, and here’s Miss Mason, daughter of a judge, asking me to clean fireplaces.” As she must have done then, she paused. Asked how much Miss Mason would give her. “Fifty
cents,” she replied, her voice like
velvet. “When I finished, all four fireplaces clean as spit, she come over to me, pretty as you please, and cool—she’d been on the porch in a good breeze—says, Mercy me, Marie, look here. Her hand held out two coins. I
looked in my purse, sure I had two quarters, and here I find one quarter and this
dime.” It was the way she said it.
Said it so Marie would see she was smarter than any colored
could hope to be. Miss Mason’s words in Marie’s mouth—I could taste
them. And Marie? She had milk to get
home. She couldn’t say, “It’s not enough, you gave your word, could you pay me later?” One word, that’s all it would take, one word, uppity, and there she’d be, down on her luck, down on her knees clean cross the
county. “We were both polite,” Marie said. “Polite, and slicker than the
courthouse floor.” She paused. “Think about
it. Both of us, so polite.” V. As a child, I thought I knew Marie.
I knew her close smell, a cross
between starch and lavender. She let me swat flies when they got too bad in the kitchen, she let me pat the biscuits onto the tin pans. She held me in her arms one
afternoon when I came running in so angry with my sister I could only blurt out, “I hate her, I hate her.”
I can’t remember now what my sister did to hurt me. I was keeping an unspoken list of her sins, her stupidities—they were my
secrets. They were evidence I could use to prove we were different. I could turn my back and walk away justified, unharmed,
unafraid. It didn’t matter we were sisters—we were different, I told
Marie. We had nothing in common, I hated her. What Marie murmured to me, I took as comfort. Oh,
Honey, she said back then in the summer kitchen’s heat. Oh, Honey. |
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