Delia tries on the accusation like a gown. A prison uniform. Something in stripes. “I’m tired of everybody thinking they know what colored means.”
Her mother looks around the shop. A teenage boy in white slacks, shirt, and a little dress-infantry paper hat mans the grill. Two old waitresses with stovepipe legs carry fries from the counter to the wooden tables. A young couple slumps over a shared soda in the booth across the way. “Who’s telling you that? Nobody here’s going to tell you what colored means. Only the o-fay do that.”
Her mother speaks that forbidden word. Once, at twelve, Delia had her mouth washed out with soap for using it. Something has broken down: the rules, or her mother. “My boys are…different.”
“Look around you, girl. Everybody here’s different. Different’s the commonest thing going.”
“I’ve got to give them the freedom to be—”
Her mother pinches up her face. “Don’t you dare talk to me about freedom. Your brother died in the war — for that word. A black man, fighting to give folks in other countries a freedom he wouldn’t ever’ve had in his own, even if he came back here alive.”
“Lots of people died in the war, Mama. White people. Black people. Yellow people.” Her boys’ other family.
“Your husband didn’t. Your husband—” She stops, unable to slander the father of her grandchildren.
“Mama. It’s not what you think.”
Her mother searches her. “Oh, don’t I know that. Nothin’s ever what I think.”
“It’s not one thing against the other. We’re not taking anything away. Just giving. Giving them space, choice, the right to make a life anywhere along—”
“This why you married a white man? So you could make babies light enough to do what they wouldn’t let you do?”
Delia knows why she married a white man. Knows the exact moment she was bound to him. But never in a million years could she explain to her mother what happened that day on the Mall, the future she saw.
Her mother stares out Haggern’s window at the passersby. “You could have stayed with us, sung every week for God and the people who need to hear Him. Why you need a fancy concert hall, where nobody gets to move or join in? There are more places to sing with us than you could have sung in a lifetime. More places to sing down here than there are in heaven.”
The kind of praise…the music I’ve studied…Every answer Delia thinks of breaks under its own weight. She’s saved by the waitress, who arrives with their orders. Steam still rises from Nettie Ellen’s slice of pie. The waitress slides it over. “Look here! This pie was hiding deep in the oven. Thinking itself too grand to come out and get eaten.”
“You try it yet?” Nettie Ellen asks.
“Ha! This place look like they treat me that good?”
“You go on have yourself a slice; tell them to put it on my bill. Go on!”
“Bless you, ma’am, but I gotta watch my figure. My man likes me all skinnied down. ‘Like a bar of soap at the end of the washing month.’”
“My man always trying to get me to fill out.”
“Gimme some of that. He got a son?”
“One.” Two, once. “But you’re going to have to wait another couple years before that particular pie comes out of the oven.”
“You come get me.” The waitress waves them both away, along with all the world’s foolishness. “I’ll be here.”
Delia will die of exile. She lived here once. Her boys never will. Never the leveling sass of a nation that sees through every pretension. One with more places to sing than even heaven. “Colored’s got to get bigger, Mama.” Something her daddy told her all her life.
“Colored, bigger? Colored’s got no room to get bigger. Colored’s been smashed down to the biggest little thing that can be, without disappearing. White’s got to get bigger. White’s never had room for nobody but itself.”
They pick at their snacks in silence. If only the children would come back. Prove to them both that nothing has changed. Still your boys. Still your grandchildren.
“White’s just one color. Black’s everything else. You gonna raise them to have a choice? That choice don’t belong to you. It don’t even belong to them. Everybody else is gonna make it for them!” Nettie Ellen puts down her fork. She’s in her daughter’s eye. “My own mother. My own mother. Had a father was white.”
The words rock Delia. Not the fact, which she long ago gathered, in the cracks of the family history. But her mother’s saying so, here, out loud. She shuts her eyes. In such pain, they could travel anywhere. “What…what was he like, Mama?”
“Like? We never laid eyes on that man. Never showed his face a day to any one of us. Never even helped pay part of her child’s way. Could have been anyone. Could have been your own man’s grandfather.”
Delia coughs a low, horrible gurgle. “No, Mama. David’s grandfather…was never anywhere near Carolina.”
“Don’t you mouth me. Don’t you backtalk.”
“No, Mama.”
“Here’s the thing I never understood. If white is so God-awful almighty, how come fifteen of their great-great-grandparents can’t even equal one of ours?”
Delia can’t help test a smile. “That’s just what I’m saying, Mama. Jonah and Joey, half their world… Don’t they come just as much from—”
“You hear anything from the man’s parents?”
David has written a hundred letters, probed scores of vaults: Rotterdam, Westerbork, Essen, Cologne, Sofia, all the systematic German records of the abyss. “Nothing yet, Mama. We’re still searching.”
Both women bow their heads. “White folks killed their grandparents. You can’t lie to them about that. You get them ready. That’s all your father’s saying, child.”
“It won’t always be this way. Things are changing, even now. We have to start making the future. It’s not going to come any other way.”
“Future! We got to make the here and now. We don’t even have that to live in, yet.”
The daughter looks away, at this room of people without a present. She doesn’t know how, but when she hears her boys sing, when they set out on their tiny adventures of canon and imitation, she finds her here and now, large enough to live in.
In that awful blood right, exercised so often as she was growing up, her mother reads her mind. “I never cared what music you sang. I never understood it myself. But anything you sang was fine by me, so long as you sang with everything you owned. And never called yourself anything you weren’t. What you going to tell them to call themselves?”
“Mama. That’s the point. We’re not calling them anything. That way, they’ll never have to call another person—”
“White? You raising them white?”
“Don’t be silly. We’re trying to raise them…beyond race.” The only stable and survivable world.
“‘Beyond’ means white. Only people who can afford ‘beyond.’”
“Mama, no. We’re raising them…” She looks for the word, and can only find nothing. “We’re raising them what they are. Themselves first.”
“Ain’t nobody so fine they deserve to put themselves first.”
“Mama, that’s not what I mean.”
“Nobody’s so good as that.” Four big beats of silence. Then: “What you going to give them, for everything you take away?”
Suppose it’s theft. Murder. The children return, saving Delia from answering. All four are rolling in hilarity. The girls pretend to be giant mechanical claws, their shrieking nephews the helpless gum balls. Nettie Ellen brings them into line with one sharp eyebrow.
“Grandmop,” Jonah says. “Aunties are crazy!”