famously unsupervised home by herself, leaving people plenty of room to speculate. So Mama went along with her cousin after school, and when her cousin disappeared with Uncle Raleigh, Mama was by herself with Daddy. This whole situation was just a matter of who was sitting next to who, when. Next thing Mama knew, there was a baby growing inside her and there was nothing that anyone could do about it. At fourteen, my mama couldn’t believe that the events of one clumsy evening had led to this. She hadn’t even known it was possible.
When Mama stopped being able to hold down her lunch, she was worried, but it was the burnt-penny taste in the back of her mouth that sent her to see Miss Sparks. From eight until noon, Miss Sparks served in the capacity of school nurse, but Mama liked her best as the home ec teacher who praised her sewing. Miss Sparks was known for her high-pitched voice that sounded almost like opera when she scolded rowdy students with her trademark refrain: “Negro people! Remember your dignity.” Miss Sparks’s gentle reminder could break up a fistfight between boys or a squabble between girls. Once, when a silver bracelet had gone missing, a word from Miss Sparks had inspired the thief to return it, newly polished and wrapped in a sheet of tissue.
Mama told her mother everything Miss Sparks had said about her condition, but she didn’t share the home ec teacher’s parting words: “What a waste.” This is what Mama was thinking of while Mattie dressed her; this was the memory that froze her in her place, aggravating Mattie so bad that she slapped my Mama’s mouth for having the nerve to cry.
THE MORNING AFTER Miss Sparks told her she was wasted, and the day before her Easter dress turned into a wedding gown, Mama got up at 7
a.m. and ironed herself a blue blouse with a Peter Pan col ar. She was boiling a pan of water for her bath when Mattie stumbled into the kitchen, sleepy-eyed and hungover.
“What you doing, Laverne?”
“Getting ready for school.”
Mattie held my mama’s arm. “They didn’t tel you? You can’t go to school no more.”
“Oh,” Mama said. “Oh,” she said again, hanging the white-col ared blouse in her closet and turning down the fire under the pan of bathwater.
Mama let her Murphy bed out, dressed it with heavy blankets despite the heat, and lay down. When her mother left to pick up the white people’s laundry, Mama opened her eyes. “What a waste.” She said it over and over.
The Henry County judge wouldn’t do it, even though Mattie kept saying, “She’s pregnant!” Mama cringed each time her mother pronounced the terrible word, which an emphasis on the first syl able. “She’s preg nant!” The judge leaned over his disorderly desk and spoke to my mama.
“Are you pregnant?”
Mama looked to Daddy, who wore the clothes he wore to sing in the youth choir. Fresh white shirt and blue pants ironed with too much starch.
Behind his glasses, Daddy looked, in turn, to Grandma Bunny. She was there, not in her Sunday best, but in a good dress, the same green of unripe tomatoes. Mama let her eyes fol ow Daddy’s and waited for him to look back at her, but he didn’t. After searching his mother’s face, he turned to Uncle Raleigh, who just tugged his shirtsleeves so that they would cover his bony wrists.
“Young lady,” the judge said.
“Sir,” she said quietly.
“Are you pregnant?”
“Oh,” Mama said.
Daddy spoke up. “I p-p-plan to own up to m-m-my responsibilities, sir.” He looked again at Grandma Bunny, who gave him a smal but generous smile. Mama wondered how it must feel for someone to be proud of you like that.
“Son, nobody is addressing you. Young lady . . .” he said again.
“I don’t know,” Mama said, hoping to stop him before he said that awful word again.
“You know,” Mattie said.
The judge leaned over his desk a little more. He had a reputation for being a decent white man, much better than the rest. Mattie’s cousin kept house for his family for thirty-some years and nobody ever laid a hand on her.
“You want to get married, gal? You want to be a wife to this boy?”
“I don’t know,” Mama said again, looking now into the judge’s face.
He settled back in his chair and fiddled with the tiny stone animals resting on his desk. He polished a quartz rabbit on his shirtfront before speaking. “I won’t do it. I can’t give you a license.”
Mattie said, “What do you mean you can’t? I’m her mother. There’s his mother. We give our permission.”
The judge shook his head. “The girl is not giving consent.”
“But she’s pregnant,” Mattie Lee said. “What would you do for your own child?”
“I can’t do it,” the judge said.
“We’l just go to Cobb County, then,” Mattie Lee said.
“You’l just have to.” The judge looked up at the wal clock.
“You can do it tomorrow. Today is done with.”
ON THE SECOND attempt, only Daddy dressed up. Mama wore the blouse she’d ironed on the day she found out she couldn’t go back to school.
Grandma Bunny was absent, as she couldn’t get a second day off from her job, but the white folks did lend the car, a Packard, which Daddy drove the twenty miles to Cobb County. They left early, as Marietta, Georgia, was not a good place to be colored after sundown; it was so racist that they had even lynched Jewish people.
Mattie sat up front with Daddy, with one hand on the dashboard to hold herself steady. In the backseat, Mama leaned herself against the door and Uncle Raleigh stretched his long pale arm over to touch her sleeve.
The second judge sold them the license without asking any questions of Mama or Daddy. He did look crooked at Uncle Raleigh. “You colored, son?”
“Yes, sir,” Uncle Raleigh said.
“Just checking,” the judge said, turning his face back toward the marriage license and signing his name in wet ink. Having done that, he held the document out in Daddy’s direction, but Mattie plucked it out of his hands and snapped it into her A-frame pocketbook, clenched tight in the crook of her arm.
Taking my mama by the sleeve of the school blouse, she steered her toward the door. “Let’s go, let’s go, let’s go.”
Mama stumbled after her, while Daddy and Uncle Raleigh fol owed behind, close as brothers and separate from the urgency of women.
THE BOYS LIVED like wild animals. This is what people said. Grandma Bunny was raising James by herself since his father got himself kil ed in a paper-mil accident. About that same time, Grandma Bunny took in Uncle Raleigh after his real mama, a redbone girl, ran off to have a better life for herself. Although she was light herself, she couldn’t stand the look of him, that’s what people said.
Grandma Bunny was a kindhearted woman, generous to orphans, mangy kittens, and other strays. Generations of cats lived under her house, fed on table scraps. Years later, when Grandma Bunny didn’t have anyone to look after but herself, she bought kibble to mix in with the leftover oatmeal.
AFTER THE WEDDING, if you could cal it that, although Mama didn’t — she wil go to her grave feeling that she had spent almost her whole life as a wife, without ever having been a bride — she went to her new home. Mama was alone in the house, while Daddy and Uncle Raleigh returned the white people’s car. She peeked into the kitchen and found it to be much like the one in her mother’s house, porcelain sink showing black where it was chipped, gas stove with two eyes, ice box. The bathroom looked about the same, too. Mama turned the knob on the left side of the sink and smiled when warm water gushed over her hand. At least there would be no heating up water just for a bath. Then she stopped grinning. She had never been naked in any home other than her own. Not even on the night that everything happened had she removed al her clothes. Lord, she wondered. What had she done? What had she gotten herself into?