Excerpt
These Heathens
1One thing needs clearing up right off: Reverend King was not the father. That was a rumor, started by crazy people and repeated by heathens. Reverend King had nothing to do with it. I only met the man once, and it wasn’t
that kind of meeting. Still, there’s been so many insinuations, innuendos, and downright accusations over the last sixty years, I’m left with no choice but to tell the thing, the way it really happened. Which I don’t appreciate. I’m old. I want to be lying in a hammock, drinking rum out a coffee mug, not setting records straight. But the Good Lord burdened me with a deep respect for the truth. So, let me say, officially: The father was nobody.
To set the story up right, I got to go back to the beginning.
I was fifteen when Ma got sick, and I had to quit school to help take care of her and Daddy and the boys. I aint want to quit, but nobody asked me what I wanted. I missed school something awful. For the first few months, I’d wonder what they were up to in math class, or what books Mrs. Lucas had assigned in English. A few times, I asked Ma and Daddy if I could go back. They both looked sorry for me, knowing how much I’d liked it, but my family needed me at home, there wasn’t any way around that. Maybe once Ma got better. They said that for two years. By the time I was seventeen, I’d long since stopped thinking about school. Or maybe I just didn’t have the time or energy to think about it anymore, because Ma had only gotten sicker over those years, which meant there was more to do than ever. Each morning, I got up before everyone else, to open the windows and let fresh air and light into our small house. I spent a few minutes praying and reading my Bible, then went out to feed the chickens and get eggs from the coop. I fixed breakfast for Daddy and the boys, and for myself. Ma aint really eat in the mornings anymore, but I made sure she had fresh water from the well to drink, and I laid out clean clothes for her just in case she wanted to get dressed. I got the boys dressed, and their faces washed as well as I could with them squirming around the whole time. I packed beans and bread, or cold chicken, for Daddy’s lunch, and after he left for work, I walked the boys the first quarter mile to school, then let them go on the rest of the way with their friends. When I got back home, I checked in on Ma before cleaning up from breakfast. Then I went out back to start the washing. That was all before eight o’clock, and there was plenty more after that, but I reckon you got the gist. Point is, there wasn’t time left in a day for thinking about things I couldn’t have—school or otherwise. I aint have a choice but to do it all, so I did, and I didn’t resent it. Jesus watched over me, kept me safe and loved, and I was grateful. I’d be lying if I said I
liked my life, but no colored girl in rural Georgia could say that in 1960. She either had it real bad or she had it okay, and I had it okay, right on. So, I thanked God every chance I got and didn’t waste time dreaming.
“Close the shades, please,” Ma told me one morning when I’d gone in her room to see if she needed anything before I cleaned up from breakfast. “It too bright out today.”
It was the middle of October, and the day was cloudy as a cataract, but I went ahead and started closing all the shades, anyhow.
“What wrong with you?”
I turned around and looked at her, confused. “Ma?”
She was raised up on her elbow, peering at me. “It something different about you, child.”
I shook my head. Every day was the same, and I was the same every day. I couldn’t remember the last time something was different about me.
She stared at me a moment longer, then seemed to run out of interest, or energy, I couldn’t tell which. She laid back on the bed and was asleep again before I got out the room.
One thing I liked about my life was the moments I had to myself, especially the few minutes between starting the laundry and when Ma came out to sit with me while I did it. No matter how sick or tired she felt in the morning, she always ended up coming out to sit with me on the back porch while I washed clothes. But for the first little while, fifteen minutes or so, I was out there by myself. These were my favorite minutes. We had a record player that Daddy had found broken somewhere and fixed, and sometimes I’d put on Mahalia Jackson while I worked, but not for that first little bit. I let it be quiet. There was always noise—the neighbors’ dogs barking, somebody’s baby screaming, everybody’s chickens bawking—but I could block it out, make a quiet space inside my head while I mixed up the soap and water. On the morning Ma said there was something different about me, I filled the quiet space with thoughts about last Sunday’s church service while I poured the washing powder into the bucket. Pastor Mills had let his daughter, Constance, lead a hymn, even though the girl couldn’t sing. Deacon Turner, who always sucked up to Pastor, had the nerve to say the girl sang “like a bird ascending toward heaven.” I was scandalized to see somebody lie so bad in church. I knew Jesus could hear us no matter where we were, but you couldn’t get a word past him in his own house. “A bird ascending toward heaven”? More like a bird getting shot out a tree. That thought made me laugh. I took out the little notebook I kept in my pocket, and the pencil I kept in my hair, and wrote it down. I’d been doing that—writing down little funny thoughts and turns of phrase—for as long as I could remember. I used to use little scraps of paper I’d tear from the corner of
The Millen News, or a paper grocery bag, or whatever was handy at the moment I had the thought. But most times I’d end up losing the scrap of paper, and the thought right along with it. When I quit school, Mrs. Lucas, who’d seen me writing thoughts on scraps of paper for a whole year, gave me a little notebook as a present. I liked it much better than the scraps, so once I’d filled it up, I went out and got another one. I’d filled up half a dozen little notebooks by now. I kept them in my bottom dresser drawer, and sometimes I’d take them out and look over what I’d written, when I had time, which I almost never did.
“Doris Steele!” It was Mrs. Haley, our neighborhood’s official crazy person, coming up behind the house.
“Ma’am?” I called out to her, hoping I wouldn’t have to come down off the porch. But she leaned against the wood fence and waved me over to her. Crazy as she was, she was still my elder, so I had to be polite. I went down the steps and crossed the yard. Soon as I was within reach, she put a gnarled hand on my stomach and, with raised, crooked, penciled-on eyebrows, said, “I can feel life pulsing inside your belly, Doris Steele.”
I shook my head and took a step back. “I’m pretty sure that’s just cream of wheat, ma’am.”
She threw her head back and cackled at the cataract sky.
Mrs. Haley was sho’nuff crazy, and it didn’t make sense to take anything she said to heart. But right then it hit me that my menses was late. So late, in fact, that I couldn’t remember when it came last. On top of that, I’d been queasy on and off the last few days. Standing there, watching Mrs. Haley, who was laughing herself to tears now, I remembered what Ma had said. “It something different about you, child.”
Shit.I left Mrs. Haley standing there and ran in the house.
I went to my room and got down on my knees beside the bed. My first prayer was:
Lord Jesus, please don’t let me be pregnant. But even as I said it, I already knew I was. So, next I prayed:
Please take it away, Lord. But that didn’t sound right, either. If I was pregnant, then it must be God’s will. What sense did it make to pray to that same God to take it away?
I got up off my knees and sat down on the bed. I thought about God’s will. I thought about my own. And I decided.
I have to get rid of it.I was sure of that, though I didn’t know why I was so sure. Truth is, my certainty surprised me, because I feared God and all the ways he might punish me for even thinking such a sinful thing. But deep in my soul, I knew I had to do it.
I hadn’t been back inside Burgess Landrum since I left it two years before, but it hadn’t changed. I went straight to Room 107, stood outside the classroom door, and peeked in through the glass pane. I knew most of the students, since almost all of them lived in Millen. Ours was a town of only about thirty-five hundred people. I’d gone to school with these kids all my life. From the doorway, I could see my cousin Ernestine sitting in the front row, and my best friend, Lena, staring all dreamy out the window. Marvin, who we called
Pervin, because he was always trying to look up some girl’s skirt, sat in the back with his legs stretched out into the aisle, like he owned the place.
