Aunt Viv lives alone and is always saying how much it suits her, even when no one was even talking about that. She had a fiancé but he abandoned her; she doesn’t know that I know a man ever fell in love with her. Gee-Ma Agnes says he broke the engagement off because of me. Apparently Aunt Viv’s fiancé had no idea she was colored until I was born, then he saw me and said: “Wait a minute…”
I don’t buy it. Aunt Viv wouldn’t speak to me at all if that was true; she’d be the way Grammy Olivia is with me. Grammy Olivia sometimes smiles at me by accident, like when she’s just turned away from somebody else who’s made her laugh and her eyes fall on me before she’s done smiling. Otherwise I get nothing from her. I remember being very small, or her being tall enough for me to expect to see a crown of clouds on her head when I looked up at her — and I made her a daisy-chain bracelet. I put it in her hand and she said “Thank you” and left it on the coffee table, but I picked it up and presented it to her all over again. The second time she held the bracelet over her wrist without letting it touch her skin, as if it looked cheap to her and she didn’t want to put it on in case it gave her a rash. Then she said something to my mother. That’s Grammy Olivia, a voice above my head, not even speaking to me, saying: “She gets darker and darker every day.” Mom didn’t answer, but she pushed me a little behind her, somehow managing to hug me at the same time. A backward hug is the only way I can think of it, Mom putting herself between me and Grammy Olivia. I’m reconsidering. Aunt Viv may have had a lily-livered fiancé after all. If so, then Dad’s right about her, and Aunt Viv’s strength is in not blaming me. Another thing that happened a little while after I was born was that Mr. Clarke at the butcher’s started giving Grammy Olivia extra little bits of cheap meat she hadn’t ordered. Ham hocks and chitterlings. “I guess he figures Livia knows how to cook ’em up real good,” Gee-Ma says, cackling so much she can hardly speak. “Not our Livia.” Mr. Clarke’s just trying to be nice, but Aunt Olivia separates the little bag from the rest of her order and gives it to the housemaid who comes in twice a week, makes her take it home with her, ignoring Gee-Pa Gerald’s “Been too long since I tasted chitlins…”
Grammy Olivia gets extra meat but Aunt Viv lost her fiancé. Do I feel bad for blowing Aunt Viv’s cover? Not really. I accidentally brought truth to light, and bringing truth to light is the right thing to do.
Aunt Mia had a stomachache last week. It wasn’t your usual type of stomachache. You don’t normally call someone to come hold your hand through a stomachache, and that’s what Aunt Mia did. She called Mom at three in the morning, maybe because she knows that Mom never just lets the telephone ring. If it rings when she’s in the shower, she yells: “Don’t just stand there, get the phone! Get the phone!” Aunt Mia called at three in the morning and it woke me up, and I stared at the silvery-blue moons painted on my ceiling, heard Mom talking to Dad. Something-something-something-gotta-look-in-on-Mia. By the time she was downstairs putting her shoes on, I was down there too, pulling on Dad’s old velvet blazer, the one he bought years ago and immediately wished he hadn’t. Mom said: “So it’s like that, huh,” and I said: “You know there’s no school tomorrow.” Mrs. Chen, Louis’s mom, drove us over to Worcester in her taxi. I think Mom tried to pay her extra for her trouble, but Mrs. Chen kept saying: “Not necessary. I don’t sleep much anyway.” Aunt Mia didn’t come to the door, so Mom let herself in with the key she has, and Aunt Mia was in her bed, on top of her sheets, not underneath them, looking greenish with nausea. Mom sat on the bed and tried to get Aunt Mia’s head on her lap but Aunt Mia said: “What, do you want me to puke?” So we just took a hand each and held on. I asked if I could get her anything and she pulled a smile out from somewhere and said what a well-brought-up child I was and, no, she couldn’t ask for anything more. After a while Mom jerked her head to bid me be gone, and I went into the kitchen, poured myself some chocolate milk, and wandered into the parlor to look at Aunt Mia’s wall of heroes. Most of her heroes are colored… like I am. Aunt Mia says she didn’t go out looking for colored heroes. She says that’s just the way it worked out. Mom and Aunt Mia murmured to each other and I studied the faces of journalists who spoke out against inequalities and wouldn’t shut up even when people threatened to kill them. If someone threatens to kill you for speaking up about something they’ve done, they must be feeling their guilt. So maybe that’s how you know you’re on the right track.
There was Ida B. Wells of the Washington Evening Star (“gutsy as hell”), her hair gathered up into a gorgeous pompadour that I’m going to try to copy as soon as my chin will agree to tilt up in just as dignified a way as hers. There was Charlotta Bass, publisher of the California Eagle… she’s still very much alive, that one — Aunt Mia got her autograph and tucked it into the frame along with the picture. There was Robert S. Abbott of The Chicago Defender with his bowler hat on, his eyes stern and kind — when I fell asleep, he was the one who stuck up for me. “It is possible to develop a nose for a good story,” he told Charlotta Bass and Ida B. Wells, when they pointed out that I didn’t have one. He borrowed Dad’s voice to say that, and I liked him all the more for it.
I knew that there was more to be discovered about Aunt Mia’s stomachache, and I followed my nose a little, or tried to, anyway, not wanting to disappoint Robert S. Abbott. On the bus home the next afternoon I asked just one question and Mom looked at me with that quick flash in her eyes, the knife look. “Try to remember that it’s none of your business, Bird.”
Something happened, that much is clear, something bigger than indigestion. But I don’t know if I’m ready to cross Mom in order to get this particular scoop. It looks like Aunt Mia’s feeling better now, anyway. I can return to this matter once my skills are honed. I’ll call that choosing my battles.
In the meantime I’ll be finding out who my enemy is, and what exactly it is he or she has got against me. Proof or deduction, I’m not fussy about how I get there. I don’t know what it’s like to wish someone ill. Sure, I’ve occasionally told Louis Chen that I hope a monster eats him, and he’s told me to go boil my head a few times, but that tends to be in the heat of the moment, and anyway we’re getting married once we get old enough, so we don’t have to make nice all of the time.
Gee-Ma Agnes (not my grandmother in any biological sense, but… it’s similar to the way things are with Aunt Mia) says I’ve definitely got one. An enemy, that is. I told her what happens to me sometimes, with mirrors, and she said: “Watch out; that’s your enemy at work, trying to get rid of you.”
I don’t think she was trying to be spooky. She was shelling pistachio nuts and she made her words sound as if they were a comment on the color of the nut meat. People assume Gee-Ma doesn’t have anything to say because she’s small and shaky and doesn’t seem to follow conversations very well. But Gee-Ma can get interested in conversation when she wants to. The stories that make everyone else say “Get outta here” are the stories Gee-Ma takes an interest in. We used to watch reruns of The Twilight Zone together, and she’d slap her knee and crow: “He’s right! Rod Serling is right.” She doesn’t like Bewitched and I Dream of Jeannie because “Magic is not a joke, Bird.”