Family Tree

I. mother, c. 1920

You wanna stop but you can’t. Just one more sip. You don’t like the taste of it. Just the burn going down your throat. A noose squeezing from the inside.

You ain’t gotten off the parlor sofa in days, and you know you need to. The state’ll take away your children and your house if you don’t get back to work, but right now, you can’t move too good. Your limbs feel stuffed with lard. Your head too, and you no longer got to raise it to smell yourself. Sticky streaks of Four Roses whiskey is all over your mouth, but ain’t nobody to see or smell you but the children.

The doorbell ring across the room and you wonder who it is. Folks stopped coming by just after the funeral, when your women-friends huddled by the stove with you, trying to tell you things was gone be all right.

Up here, a Colored widow can survive easier. You can even keep your house.

Yes, you thought, but with a husband dead and gone, you gotta work more hours to pay the rent, and what about the coal bill and the milk bill and the ice bill? Carfare and food?

Our mamas had it worser before ’Mancipation. Wasn’t even allowed to marry, period. Had to make do on they own, and they did.

Your good friend Lucy Grimes, who you met on the train up from Alabama, smiled her dimpled smile and added, “We all here, ain’t we?”

But you almost wasn’t here; your ma kicked you out before you was grown. You never told nobody that, and Lucy couldn’t relate even if she knew. Her parents died on her when she was little, but a neighbor took her in and raised her. Wasn’t no neighbor to take care of you because of what they thought about your ma. You been making do ever since, and you just plain tired of it. And ain’t no use looking for another husband because they all gonna die, just like your ma’s did.

Your eldest child Verna walk into the room and glance at you by way of asking to answer the door. You nod and pull the sheet over your head.

When Verna open the door, you go cold, and not just from the wind that blow in. You hear Miz Paterson speaking. She ain’t never been to Vauxhall before, and there she be, on your porch on Waldorf Place, asking how you been and when you coming back to work. You pray she can’t see you. Or smell you.

“My mother sick, Mrs. Paterson.” (Always trying to act proper, that Verna. No “miz” for her, only “missus.”) “She had a real bad fever since the day after Christmas.”

You wonder where she learned to lie like that. Always saying something that ain’t true.

“The doctor think she might have the influenza.”

Miz Paterson can’t bear to be in the same room if somebody make the slightest cough or sneeze. You hear her gasping, and you imagine her wanting to run down the porch stairs.

You grunt out a laugh, and then you can’t stop. You push your face against the pillow to shush the sound. Verna start coughing, like she trying to cover it up too.

It must be the whiskey, finally making you giddy, and you like that mood. It’s better than how you been feeling the past few days. But when Verna shut the door, it’s like you fell into a hole deep as Jim’s grave again.

Miz Paterson ain’t gone sympathize with you being away much longer. It was her husband, not her, who told you to stay home a few days after Jim died and to take Christmas off too, and that ain’t surprise you. Miz Paterson never cared about the goings-on in your life that made you miss work, like that time all your four children got the whooping cough. She threw a hissy because you was...