“Something feels sad about that girl,” my mama said.
“I was about to say the same thing,” said the lady with the lap baby. “I wonder what kind of home she’s going back to.”
“There was a girl like that at my high school,” my mama said. “Had a baby for her daddy. She had that same beat-down way about her.”
“But such a pretty girl,” the old lady said. “And al that hair.”
“Pretty ain’t everything,” I said, surprising myself by speaking up.
“You jealous, Chaurisse?” my mama said.
“No. I’m just saying there could be more to her than just that. And she might have a good home. She could just be lonely. It’s a lot of people walking around that’s lonely.”
SINCE IT WAS a Wednesday night, Mama and I sat down to dinner by ourselves. My mother stood at the counter tossing a large salad. She was always watching what she ate. My mother was on a diet on the day I was born. On the bottom of my foot, there is a birthmark, several smal brown splotches arranged like a little constel ation. These are orange seeds, I am told. There was a rumor that pregnant ladies who consumed lots of vitamin C would lose their baby weight faster. It didn’t work. My mother grew two dress sizes after I was born, firmly lodging her at a size 18, which made her eligible to shop at the fat ladies’ store.
I went into the fridge and pul ed out two cans of Coke, diet for mama, regular for me.
“You want a glass, Mama?”
She said, “Can is al right for me.”
We sat at the table, across from each other, she at the nine, and me at the three. The twelve and the six are for Daddy and Uncle Raleigh, even if they aren’t here.
Mama squeezed a lemon over her salad while I layered mine with Green Goddess.
“There’s no point in eating salad if you’re going to do that.”
“I know,” I said.
She shook her head at me. “That girl this afternoon, she looks familiar. What was going on with her?”
“I don’t know.”
Mama said, “She nervouses me.”
“She’s al right,” I said. “I kind of like her.’
“She tel you what her problem is? She pregnant?”
“She was worried about going to col ege. That’s what she was talking about.”
“It’s good for her to be concerned about her education. I didn’t finger her for the type.”
“Can’t judge a book by its cover,” I said.
“What are you thinking about col ege?”
“What do you think about Mount Holyoke? That’s where Dana said she was going.”
“Never heard of it, but it can’t be any better than Spelman Col ege. That’s where I would have gone if things had turned out different.”
My mother finished her salad and looked into the bowl with a sort of empty dissatisfaction. She reached for a saltine cracker and ate it slowly.
She rubbed her eyes with the heels of her hands.
“Your daddy’l be home after while. What do you think he wants for dinner?” She got up and opened the freezer, and found four chicken legs. She set them in a bowl of warm water to thaw. “I should make enough for Raleigh, too.”
“Yeah,” I said. “Might as wel .”
16
THE REST, LIKE THEY SAY, IS HISTORY
WHEN I WAS JUST three months old, sick as a dog with colic, only Daddy could calm me down. I would wake up crying that high-pitched miserable cry and Daddy would get out of bed, go to my room, wrap me up in a couple blankets, and we might spend the rest of the night touring the back roads of DeKalb County in the Lincoln. It wasn’t just the fresh air that soothed me, though I stil like to drive with the windows open, even in winter. It was the going that I liked. Around that same time, Raleigh bought me a baby swing from Sears, Roebuck. He assembled the pink and yel ow contraption with a flathead screwdriver and an Al en wrench. Once it was upright and sturdy, Uncle Raleigh and Mama waited for me to start crying.
Being as I was a preemie, born almost dead, I cried al the time. At the first whimper, Mama and Raleigh scooped me up, strapped me in, and started the swing to rocking. When the whimper switched over into something more in the category of a howl, Daddy was the one who rescued me, told them to give it up.
While he and I were cruising al over southwest Atlanta, down by Niskey Lake, even winding through the beautiful paths at West View Cemetery, Mama and Raleigh were taking the baby swing apart and fitting it back in the cardboard box. Al that back-and-forth did nothing for me. I needed forward motion and the quiet hum of a wel -tuned engine.
We kept up our motor excursions even after I stopped crying in the night. It’s il egal now to drive a car with a three-year-old in your lap, her little palms on the wheel, but this stil remains one of my fondest memories. I can stil remember stretching my hands to grip the steering wheel, Daddy saying, “There you go, Buttercup. There you go.” When I was twelve, it was time to take things to the next level.
Although the state wouldn’t al ow it until I was sixteen, I was ready to drive. Daddy took me for my first lessons at the Ford factory off 1-75. We went on Sundays, when the almost three thousand union workers were home sleeping in, leaving the massive parking lot almost empty.
“You know what?” he said to me on our way to my first lesson. “Driving is the most important thing you can know how to do. When I was a boy, I used to drive for white people, the same white people that my mama cleaned for. At first, when I was fifteen, sixteen, I used to wish I was the one riding in the backseat. I could picture myself walking out of the school building and there being a man in a hat, waiting to take me somewhere.”
“Where did you want to go?” I asked him.
“I didn’t even know for sure. I guess I imagined I would have the car carry me to Atlanta. Or just to a nice restaurant where I could sit down and eat something good, like steak and a glass of sweet tea. Maybe a baked potato. A country boy like me, that was al the finery I could imagine. Sour cream on the potato. I had never even tasted it before, but I always heard white folks asking for it or saying they didn’t want it.” He shrugged and smiled over at me. “You didn’t know your daddy could be so sil y, did you?”
I smiled back at him and tried to imagine him as a boy. I had seen a couple of his old school portraits, the black-and-white tone blurring into something gray and indistinct. JIMMY WITHERSPOON was written right below the col ar of his white shirt. When I stayed with Grandma Bunny for a month each summer, that picture was the first thing I saw when I opened my eyes, but I could never get my brain to accept that this Jimmy Witherspoon with the lazy eye and confident smile was my father.
“So the idea I had — to have my own driver one day — led me to thinking what kind of job I would need in order to have somebody to drive me.
My mama’s white people, they got their money because they owned the paper mil , and I knew I didn’t want to have nothing to do with the paper mil .
Just the smel alone was enough to run you away, no matter what the money was like. So I couldn’t think of nothing else, and it started making me depressed. Crazy as it was, I wanted to have a white man driving me around, to let him see what it feels like.” Daddy laughed. “My imagination was in overdrive. A black man having a chauffeur was crazy enough, but hiring a white man to drive? Absolutely insane. But this was my dream, and I didn’t tel nobody about it except Raleigh.”
“What did Uncle Raleigh say?
Daddy said, “You know how Raleigh is. He don’t like to argue. He just asked me if I was going to let my white driver use the front door or the back door when he showed up for work. I said I would go on and let him walk in the front. Then Raleigh asked me if maybe I could just use a real light-skinned black man to do the driving, that way it would look like I had a white driver, but I wouldn’t have to deal with al the problems that might come along with trying to boss a real white man. I laughed and told him that the only person in the world more uppity than an actual white man was a light-skinned nigger. I think that hurt his feelings, but I wasn’t talking about Raleigh. Your uncle is a special case, you know.”