“You can do that?”
“People can do whatever they want.”
I thought it over while scratching the mosquito bites on my legs. “What about James? I can’t have two daddies, can I?”
“James wil always be your father.”
“So what about Uncle Raleigh?”
“Okay,” my mother said. “It’s like this. When you get older, you wil say to people, ‘My real father didn’t raise me. My mother married my uncle and so I think of my uncle as my father.’ You get it?”
“No.”
“Dana,” my mother said, “let’s try this from another direction. If you could pick just one daddy, who would it be? Raleigh or James?”
“I don’t know.”
“It’s up to you, Dana. Tel me what you want, because al I want is what’s best for you.”
“If we pick Raleigh to be my daddy, would James be mad at us?”
My mother said, “Yes.”
“What about Uncle Raleigh? If you say he can’t be my daddy, wil he be mad at me?”
“His feelings wil be hurt.”
“Wil he cry?”
My mother thought it over for a moment. “He might cry, but not when you are around. You won’t have to look at him crying.”
In the back of the Lincoln, I felt comfortable and cool for the first time in almost two weeks. I wished my mother and I could stay there forever, mul ing over our options, being loved by my father and Raleigh at once.
“I don’t want to hurt Uncle Raleigh’s feelings.”
“Me either, honey, but somebody’s going to get hurt in this. There’s no getting around it.” She gathered me against her even though she was so clean and pretty and I was Alabama-dirty and sorghum-sticky. “I love you, Dana,” she said. “I love you more than anyone.” She pressed her face into my filthy hair. “You are my life.”
I used to love her desperate love for me, her weighty kisses. Hers was an electric affection burning away everything it touched, leaving me only with the clean lines of a lightning rod.
“Mama,” I said.
“Yes?”
“What about James? If we go off with Raleigh, he’l just live with his wife and his other girl?”
“Yes.”
“That’s not fair.”
“Not fair to who, baby?”
“It’s not fair that they get to just have James al by theirself.”
“No,” my mother said. “It’s not fair.”
“Why can’t they be the ones to go be with Raleigh?”
“It doesn’t work like that,” my mother said.
My mother sat beside me, leaving everything in my nine-year-old hands. I couldn’t bear the idea of Chaurisse having my father al to herself, cal ing him Daddy and living her life like she was in a Beverly Cleary book. Even then, I understood Raleigh to be a good person, an excel ent uncle, but an uncle wasn’t the same thing as a daddy. There wasn’t any such thing as a “new daddy.” You got one father in the beginning, and that was it.
Through the tinted glass of the Lincoln, the scene on the front porch looked foreboding, as though a storm had come to town like a sinister carnival. Raleigh had his camera aimed at Wil ie Mae, who laughed and tossed a handful of pea hul s at him. He pressed the shutter again and again.
(In 1988, when we buried Wil ie Mae, I wanted to put one of those pictures on her funeral program, but my mother said she wouldn’t have wanted to look so country. I have them stil , in a silver box, beside my gold earrings.)
“Wil we stil get to see Uncle Raleigh if he’s not my new daddy?”
My mother nodded. “Raleigh’s like us. He doesn’t have anywhere else to go.”
“Let’s just keep it like it is,” I said. “Can we do that?”
MY MOTHER AND I got out of the car together. She held my hand as though I were a flower girl. As we approached the porch, Raleigh stood up, sending a shower of purple-tinted hul s to the floor, some landing on his just-shined shoes.
“We need to talk to you,” my mother said.
“Al right,” Raleigh said.
“In private,” my mother said.
Wil ie Mae took my arm with the same firm grip she’d used just the night before when snatching me away from her uncle. “Leave her here with me, Gwen. Don’t get her al tangled up in grown folks’ business.”
My mother let me go; my free hand fel to my side.
“There’s no privacy,” Wil ie Mae said. “Except in the car.”
Raleigh said, “I don’t want to talk in the car. I don’t want to get in that car.” He was getting antsy, shifting his weight around, causing his camera to bounce on his chest against his pretty yel ow tie.
“Go out in the back, then,” Wil ie Mae said. “You’l have to go through the kitchen, but you can be alone out there.”
They went into the house, saying “Excuse me” to the women and cousins clustered there. They would be confused until we had gone, and Wil ie Mae would explain that Raleigh wasn’t real y a white man, he just looked like one. At least one person would claim to have suspected it al along.
I sat back on the porch with Wil ie Mae and the pan of peas. She broke the seal of each pod with her fingernail and shoved the glossy peas out with her thumb.
“She’s out there breaking his heart, huh?” Wil ie Mae said, without looking over at me.
“We are going to keep everything like it is,” I said.
Wil ie Mae shrugged. “It’s her life.”
I struggled for a while with the peas, while Wil ie Mae’s hands zipped through the task.
“She asked me who I wanted for my daddy.”
“She did?”
“I told her I wanted to keep my same daddy.”
“Gwen should know better than to put that weight on you.”
“Is she going to tel Uncle Raleigh that I didn’t want him for my daddy?”
Wil ie Mae put the pan of peas on the floor near her feet. “No, honey. Gwen would never sel you down the river like that. Whatever you want to say about her when you get grown, you can never say that she betrayed you.”
RALEIGH AND MY MOTHER had their conversation in the backyard among the laundry. The sheets provided wet curtains, sealing them in with the clean-soap sweetness and the unforgiving scent of bleach. They were standing where Wil ie Mae had taught me to hide the secret things, the clothes you didn’t want visible from the street. I asked her to hang al my things there, not just my underwear, but my shorts, T-shirts, socks, even the towels I used. She laughed but did as I asked.
Wil ie Mae and I moved ourselves to the kitchen, where the women stirred pots and wiped sweat from their faces. We kept our eyes on the screen door, but we couldn’t see anything but the sheets, stil and impassive.
“Just keep your ears open,” Wil ie Mae said. “You never know what a man wil do when you try and quit him.”
“Uncle Raleigh is not going to do nothing to my mama.”
“This is not about your uncle, honey. It’s just about being grown. Just listen for anything that doesn’t sound right.”
I listened, but al I heard was the sounds of canning. I couldn’t make out their voices. I didn’t hear the click of the camera shutter, but I know that Raleigh took pictures; I’ve seen them. Close-ups of Mother’s face, eyes cast down. There is a photo of just her feet, the slender heels of her satin pumps sinking into the Alabama dirt. There is one of the palm of her hand covering the lens. The last in the series are six or seven of his own stricken face, his arms extended to hold the camera. These he must have taken once my mother had left him out there with the laundry, running to the kitchen and Wil ie Mae’s waiting arms.
“I told him,” she said.
“What did you say?” Wil ie Mae wanted to know.
“I told him that I couldn’t do it to Dana. That she needed her real father. He started saying, ‘Do you love me, Gwen? Do you love me, Gwen?’ I told him that this wasn’t the point, that it wasn’t a game.”