Читать книгу Mulberry - Paulette Boudreaux - Страница 10

AS I LAY IN bed that night, trying to will myself into sleep, I kept thinking that my whole life had changed with the birth of Baby Ida Bea. I was resenting her and regretting the fact that I had ever wanted a sister. Looking back now, I realize that the changes had started the summer before with the arrival of wild, untamed Esther Rawlins. Since all the kids who lived near me were boys, including the three in my house, I was starved for the company of another girl. But that warm summer day in the middle of June when we met, I hated her.

“Just who do you think you are?” I was mad enough that I would have hit her if she had been standing on level ground with me. As it was, she towered about thirty feet above me in my mulberry tree, eating my mulberries and possessing the nerve to tell me I couldn’t climb up and join her. Nobody had ever told me I couldn’t climb a tree. Nobody. Not even my own momma. And every kid in the neighborhood asked my permission before they climbed my tree. They could climb any other tree in the neighborhood, even the other mulberries, but not this one. This one was mine. It grew in a large open field across the road from my family’s house. The rough, knobby bark of its trunk was as familiar to me as the soft wrinkly skin of my knees and elbows. The slender lumpy flesh and rich sweetness of its berries were mine to savor. And mine alone, unless I decided to share. I’d staked my claim on this tree ages ago. Everybody understood that, and this new girl would too before the day was over.

Her cheeks bunched out in a derogatory way and she spit a mouthful of purple-red already-chewed mulberries at my feet.

“I’m Esther Denise Rawlins. That’s who I am,” she yelled. “I’m queen of this here mulberry tree.”

“I’m Madeleine Genell Culpepper and ain’t nobody climbs this tree without my say so ’cause this is my mulberry tree. And you ain’t no queen. You a ugly, high-yellow cow!” These were some of my worst insults, the ones I had learned from hanging around my mama and her friends. I knew that no Negro female who liked herself even a little bit liked being called a cow. And high-yellow? Well high-yellow was something a lot of Negroes found it advantageous to be in Mississippi, but nobody liked being called high-yellow to their face.

“What’d you call me?” Mulberry juice dripped from the corners of her mouth onto her thin face, which was the color of fresh-cut pine.

“You heard me. I called you ugly, I called you high-yellow, and I called you a cow.”

She stood stock still for a moment, hugging the trunk of my tree with her arm, her feet planted on my favorite branch, the one that jutted out from the trunk like a long narrow thumb. Her face turned pink under her yellowish skin. “I’m going to whip your butt when I get down out this tree.”

“You and what army, you skinny, yellow, nappy-headed cow?” I had taken note of the wild mane of frizzy brown hair that framed her face like a straw hat. Hers was the first afro I’d ever seen. No self-respecting Negro female in my community wore her hair in its natural state in Mississippi in 1963. It made her look insane.

“You better not still be out here when I get down out of this tree.” Her back was to me as she descended from her perch.

“I ain’t scared of you, or nobody else.”

I was too indignant to think about the fact that she might be bigger than me, or a better fighter than me. It turned out that she was almost a head taller than me and a better fighter. She fought like a cat, clawing and biting at me with manic tenacity. I don’t know how long we rolled around in the dirt trying to damage each other before we were pulled apart by my mother. She walked Esther to her grandma’s porch and made her go inside. Then she led me into our house and gave me a lecture that included, “Maddy, you’re getting to be too close to grown to be fighting in the dirt like that. Animals act like that. You need to start acting like a lady so folks can treat you like one.”

She kept me in the house with her for the rest of the day, doing housework, a round of chores that I hated. While my brothers’ happy, high-pitched voices floated in through the windows, I moped in the shadowy confines of our house helping Momma clean and wash laundry. As I was pinning the clean wash to the line outside, Esther came over to apologize.

“My grandma says I need to make up to you, otherwise I’m going to be playing by myself all summer ’cause you’re the only other girl around for miles. I already hate it here. Playing by myself all the time, I would hate even more. So I apologize for hitting you first.”

“Accepted,” I said, without even turning to look at her. I was mad about all the housework I was doing because of her. I waited for her to walk away, but she didn’t. She hung around in the yard, doing I don’t know what, since I refused to turn around. I kept reaching into the wash bucket and pulling out the wet clothes that I had rubbed on the washboard so hard earlier that my knuckles were scraped raw in places.

“What you doing that for?” Esther asked after a while.

“Punishment.”

“I’d rather be beat.”

Her words, like her hair, were insane. I turned to get a better look at a crazy person up close. What I saw was a girl a little bit taller than me with mean red welts on her wiry arms and legs.

“Who did that to you?”

“Grandma.”

“Ma Parker?”

“Y’all call her that. She my grandma.”

“What’d she hit you with?”

“Extension cord.”

That old Ma Parker could hit someone with enough force to raise welts was unimaginable to me. Esther had picked up a plank from the ground and was swinging it like a baseball bat. She clearly had some mastery of pain that I couldn’t even guess at. Watching her, I started to cry.

“Cut that out,” she yelled, “or I’ll never be your friend. I hate crybabies.”

It was the sincerity in her voice and fear on her face that made me stop. Suddenly something in her seemed admirable. I thought again of being her friend. I wanted to keep her from harm. While I was subject to the whims and commands of the adults around me, I was sure my world was safer than hers. I could keep her safe if I brought her into mine.

During the next few weeks we became fast friends, and we were inseparable as we roamed the neighborhood, exploring the houses, the woods, and the creek. My family lived at 1 Harvest Quarters, a three-minute walk in from the main street. Esther’s grandma lived at 2 Harvest Quarters. The last house along the curved road was number 21.

Before Esther arrived, I had never set eyes on the houses from numbers 9 through 20. Occasionally, the long processional from the neighborhood to the local school included children from some of those houses, but their attendance was so irregular that I had no more than a nodding acquaintance with any of them, except one who had been in class with me since first grade, Percy Blakely. I disliked him on principle because all the other kids in my class did, and because my mother had taught my brothers and me that we were better than the other kids in the quarters and that we were not to associate with them. Momma had even forbidden me to go any farther than 5 Harvest Quarters, the last house she could see from our front porch. The only time in my eleven years that she ever hit me was when I was five and she found me building mud castles with a boy in the backyard at 7 Harvest Quarters. She dragged me home and whipped my bare legs with a thin switch she snapped from a shrub in our backyard.

“Crazy things go on deep in these Quarters, and I don’t want you back there,” she yelled at me when she stopped stinging my legs with the switch. She threatened to give me a worse beating if I ever went beyond house 5 again.

I had cried and sulked for hours afterward. Although the places where that switch had licked my skin did sting for a while, that wasn’t the primary source of my long, drawn-out sadness. What had hurt the most was the shock of being hit by my mother and seeing an unfamiliar anger in her eyes that was directed at me. From that I surmised that what went on deep in the Quarters must be truly horrible. I imagined that fairytale monsters like goblins, trolls, and witches must live in the unseen reaches of my neighborhood. For Esther, my imagination, however vivid, wasn’t enough to satisfy her curiosity.

“What your mama don’t know can’t hurt her,” Esther teased. “Besides, you grown enough to take care of yourself. You almost as grown as me, and I don’t need nobody to take care of me.”

For some time I had been growing less interested in learning the kinds of things Momma wanted to teach me—how to sew, how to braid my own hair, how to properly season a pot of beans, how to iron a blouse. But my belief in her power over me remained intact. I was still afraid to lie to her. “Don’t even try lying to me, ’cause you can’t get nothing by me,” she would say. I was sure she would spot a lie and swat it from the air and I would have hell to pay.

But that year as June wound down into July, Esther was becoming my new authority, and she was a good liar, good enough for her lies to sail right pass Momma. Sometimes she concocted elaborate stories to tell my mother about how we spent our time when we were out of her sight. Momma listened, busy with whatever housework she was doing. Sometimes she paused in the middle of one of Esther’s tales and asked, “Really?”

“Yes ma’am,” Esther answered, and kept on with her story. As the summer wore on, Momma stopped asking how Esther and I had spent our time.

So whenever Esther suggested it, I followed her as she meandered through the woods to come out at a different part of the Quarters. We were exploring house by house surreptitiously, seeing what we could see, hearing what we could hear. Before the summer was over we had seen nearly every house in the Quarters more than once. What we found sometimes shocked and appalled me.

We found an old woman who kept a pet monkey locked away in her house. We saw it playing in her front window. Sometimes it got out and attacked children. It jumped on their heads and scratched their faces and necks. We even encountered kids who proudly showed their scars to prove the stories. There were several houses that I now know were bootleg whiskey joints. At the time I just thought of them as music houses. There was always loud music flowing out of those places and grinning, preoccupied grown-ups with glasses of “water” on the porches. Once, I saw my classmate Percy Blakely, shirtless and barefoot, in the yard in front of one of those houses. When he saw me, he ran onto the porch and disappeared inside.

“There goes Percy from my class,” I told Esther. She went to the porch and asked an old woman sitting with a glass of clear liquid in her hand if a boy named Percy lived there.

“Child, git on ’way from here,” she told Esther. “Y’all don’t need to know nothing ’bout nothing or nobody up in this house.”

Esther turned and grinned at me where I stood in the road. She shrugged, a magnificent gesture with her arms thrown out from her sides, palms skyward. “She say Percy don’t live here.”

“I ain’t said nothing, but get out of my yard, you little hard-headed sow. You come round here again I’m going to take a switch to those skinny little legs of yours. Now gone.”

Esther acted as if she hadn’t heard. She flung her arms out and danced wildly around in the yard. I stayed where I was, looking on shyly, until the woman, mean enough to be somebody’s mother, stood and moved to the top of the steps. “Y’all get on ’way from here before I tell y’all’s mama.”

Esther stuck her tongue out, then turned and ran away laughing.

Another time when we were exploring the Quarters, there was the old man who offered us a dollar apiece if we would come see what he had inside his pants. “It won’t bite you,” he assured us. “It likes little girls. You don’t even have to touch it if you don’t want to.” It was the quick tug on my arm from Esther and the alarmed look on her face that made me turn and run. I imagined that I felt the heat of the old man’s breath on the back of my legs as Esther and I ran away. We ran all the way to my mulberry tree and climbed as high as we could go and lolled about on the branches like cats until we caught our breath. Esther confided to me that she had already seen what was inside men’s pants.

“I’ve seen my brothers’ weenies,” I said, confident and proud.

“It’s not the same thing at all. Men’s things are ten times as big, and if you touch them they get even bigger. They make babies too,” she added, as a final cause for condemnation.

This explained why my mother kept swelling up big and round before she would go to the hospital and come home with a baby. It was my father who kept putting the babies there. I had asked Momma once how it happened, and she had told me, her only girl child, that it was none of my business.

Esther telling me this new information about where the baby inside my mother came from felt hateful and mean to me. But Esther wasn’t even thinking of me when she said it. Her eyes had a faraway, glazed-over look she got sometimes, like she was seeing something I couldn’t see. The sudden distance between us filled me with sadness, and I could smell the end of summer and see the leaves of my mulberry tree changing color.

“Last one out of the tree is a rotten egg,” I shouted and started scurrying from the tree like a squirrel. I couldn’t stand for her to think about things that didn’t involve me, and I hated the idea of fall. That meant school, and Esther going away.

“I’m going to my mother’s house,” Esther said with her back to me one day as we hunted along the edge of the creek for fresh blackberries. Her grandma had promised to make us a pie if we brought back enough in the syrup buckets she gave us. Mine was half-full already.

“I thought you were staying until the end of summer.” I tried to keep the panic from showing by practicing the sort of busy detachment that she was good at. I parted the weeds with the end of my stick, pretending to be absorbed in the hunt for berries.

“I am. I’m only going to her house for two nights.”

“Seems silly to go home and then come back.”

“I don’t live with my mama, stupid.” She stopped and looked at me like I was some kind of moron. “I live with my Aunt Helen up in Meridian. My mama lives right here in Blossom.”

I don’t know why I didn’t know that, but I didn’t. The idea of a girl not living with her mother had never occurred to me. I knew one girl at school, Collette Willis, who didn’t live with her mother. She lived with her grandma, but her mother was dead. This was different.

“Why don’t you live with your mother?”

Esther stopped her hunt for a moment and looked at me. She dragged her fingertips across her eyebrows and brought them to rest in the baby hairs at the base of her skull.

“When I was little I didn’t want to,” she said. “I liked my Aunt Helen better. I don’t remember why. My mama loved me, but I loved my auntie.”

I had watched her lie to my mother and to her grandma about all sorts of things, and I had noted her habit of fingering her eyebrows or pulling at the little hairs at the back of her neck when she was telling a lie. So I knew she was lying to me, but I couldn’t challenge her. I thought I might lose something important if I shattered the image I had of her. After all, I was trying to model myself after her. I imitated her walk, pointing my toes inward toward each other to gain the feel of her slightly bowlegged, pigeon-toed gait. I let her unplait my hair when we were out of my mother’s sight, so I had a dark afro to match her lighter one. I had even adopted her speech patterns, letting my voice rise high at the end of each sentence and greeting people with “hey” instead of the “good morning” and “good afternoon” that my mother had taught me. Everything about her seemed right. So I let her stay inside her lie and reassured myself that she had a good reason for it.

“Do you want to come or not, Maddy?”

“Come where?”

“My mama’s, stupid.”

“Can I?”

“I don’t see why not. I’ll just ask Grandma to ask your mama.”

“Sure.”

Relief spread across her face.

Esther’s mama was tall and thin, an elongated version of Esther. Her skin was a deeper brown, though, and her hair was the color of mine, but she had the same angular face shape as Esther, and the same hard black eyes peering out at the world defiantly.

“Careful of my dress,” she said to Esther as we slid into the backseat of the cab beside her.

Esther, sitting in the middle, pushed against me so hard that I ended up with my arm pressed against the cool, sturdy metal door handle during the long ride to a side of town that I had never visited.

Esther’s mama talked to her in short little sentences. Her words, her tone, her questions all seemed unnatural for someone who was a mother. Mothers were authoritative with kids, always sure of their motherly power. They asked the right questions and were economical with the words they used on children. Economical was different from stingy, which is how Esther’s mother spoke, as if each word became lost to her forever. And she behaved with a stiff discomfort that signaled fear, the kind of fear that children, like wild animals, can sense. That kind of fear usually incited wildness in us, but I sensed fear in Esther too. Her fear made me scared, because as far as I could tell, Esther wasn’t scared of anything—except, it seemed, her mother.

To manage my uneasiness, I stared out the window as my shabby neighborhood was replaced by a neater one with cement sidewalks and small painted houses with screened-in porches. Some of the yards had manicured lawns and tidy flowers or hedges, unlike the bare, parched yards and ditches in the Quarters.

Esther’s mama’s house was white and had square hedges and yellow and purple flowers out front. Inside the house, her rooms were laid out in the same shotgun design as ours, though she had four inside rooms instead of the three that my family shared. The furniture looked new. Everything matched and was stylishly arranged like on a television show, and though it was Friday, she made a Sunday supper of pork chops and gravy, mashed potatoes, and English peas, and there was a mulberry cobbler. She even had paper napkins on the table.

Through supper and the three hours we spent in front of the small, round black and white television set, Esther used words like please and thank you. Words I had never heard cross her lips. She sat straight-backed on the sofa wearing the pink frilly dress that her grandma had insisted on, looking unnatural with her hands folded in her lap and her hair pulled back and braided into two plaits that hung heavily to her shoulders. Her scarred legs and bony elbows were shiny from the grease her grandma had rubbed onto them. I was also a model child, wearing my Sunday best and my favorite plaited hairstyle.

Esther’s mama made us a pallet of blankets and quilts to sleep on the floor in one of the middle rooms. Esther and I lay whispering together in the dark until the soft sounds of her mother’s snoring floated in from the other room. Esther got up and began to rummage around, striking matches from the box she had sneaked from her grandma’s kitchen. She peeked in boxes and dresser drawers and looked under furniture. This was the bold, curious Esther I was used to. She wanted to see how her mother lived, she said.

“Look what I found,” she whispered, coming back to the pallet with a small bottle in her hand. In the shadowy light of a match’s flame, I saw that it was a bottle of pink nail polish. She turned the bottle slowly so the light glistened off the smooth glass as if it were a jewel. My mama didn’t use the stuff, but I thought it was pretty on the ladies I saw wearing it. “Let’s paint our nails,” Esther suggested.

Little alarm bells sounded in my head. “Shouldn’t we wait and ask and do it tomorrow?” It wasn’t right. It was just like stealing to use the polish without permission. And besides, how would we hide it from her mama the next day?

“This is my mama’s house. I can use anything I want.” The irritated pitch of her voice reminded me that she had no tolerance for other people’s fear. “Anyway, I’m sure she left it here for me to use,” she said and smacked her tongue against the roof of her mouth making a sound that until now I had only heard grown-up women make.

I held my breath, afraid to implicate myself with even a sigh. Agreeing with her was out of the question. Something about her mother frightened me. She was not governed by the laws of other mothers. I could not tell what governed her.

“Well, go ahead, be a chicken. I’ll just paint my own then,” Esther hissed at me in the darkness.

And she did, carefully, methodically, while I lit one match after another and held it steady for her. When she was done, she lay back on the pallet and waved her hands in the darkness. I lay there wondering about Esther and her mama.

Esther sat up and struck another match. She held the nail polish aloft and examined the bottle from every angle. “I wonder if this stuff burns,” she said quietly.

“How could it?” I answered. “It’s wet. Wet things don’t burn.”

“I bet it does.”

A new anxiety laid claim to me as I watched Esther’s ghostly face wavering in the light of the match. Her eyes were dark holes in her face.

“Yeah, you’re probably right.” I wanted her to let go of this idea, to move on to something harmless.

“I don’t think you should do this,” I whispered. My anxiety was growing into a complicated fear. She turned away from me. “Esther, this is bad.”

“No it ain’t. Want to know something? I bet you that if we put a piece of string in this bottle it will burn just like a little bitty coal-oil lamp. Then we won’t have to keep striking matches. What you want to bet me?”

“Nothing. What we need to see for? It’s time to go to sleep.”

But Esther was already hunting around the room for a suitable wick.

“My mama took me to a beauty parlor once and got my hair done up like Shirley Temple’s,” I tried again, lying as I watched her stuff a small rag into the mouth of the bottle.

“You ever had your hair done like Shirley Temple’s?”

“No,” she shot back, not even glancing my way as she struck a match and held it to the end of the rag. She set the bottle down and smiled as a small yellow flame grabbed the end of the rag and moved toward the neck of the bottle. As the rag shortened, the flame sputtered and became blue. Then it disappeared into the mouth of the bottle and a pungent, sweet smell rose from the bottle in a stream of thick gray smoke with a pale bluish tint at its base.

We looked at each other in the pale gray-blue light as the smoke filled the room. It was clear that something had to be done, but neither of us knew what.

I had a sudden vision of the house smoldering silently in a pale blue flame, with the scent of burning nail polish invading the neighborhood.

“What the hell!” Esther’s mama was outlined in the smoke that filled the doorway. “What the hell have you done?” She rushed into the center of the room, stepping on my arm. She pulled the chain and turned on the single lightbulb hanging from its cord in the ceiling. She gawked at the nail polish bottle smoldering in the center of the floor like a tiny volcano, then grabbed a hand-mirror and hairbrush from the dresser. She squatted beside the smoking bottle, brushed it onto the face of the mirror, stood, and rushed from the room. We heard her cursing and swearing as she slammed the back door open and, no doubt, tossed the burning bottle into the dew-dampened grass of the backyard. When she came back into the room, we were still staring at the doorway.

“Your dumb ass still ain’t learned a thing.” Her eyes were vicious as she looked at Esther. “You a lot bigger than you was when I threw you out of here before, but you still just as stupid as the day is long. You just like that crazy bastard that sired you. There ain’t none of me in you. But I know how to deal with you.”

Two steps brought her to the pallet where we lay, immobilized. Esther let out a sharp frightened sound like a dog that has been hurt as her mama grabbed one of her plaits and pulled her to her feet. “I know exactly how to fix your smart ass,” she hissed, as she led Esther out of the room by her hair.

From the other room I heard quick intakes of breath and the muted thuds and smacking sounds that my mama’s fists made when she pounded dough to make bread. The noises were magnified like sounds in a bad dream that seemed to go on too long. I thought about getting up and running from the house, but I couldn’t move. My heart pounded, and I prayed to Jesus for salvation as I had learned to do in Sunday School. My voice rose and fell in a frantic litany of every prayer I had ever learned. “Our father … the Lord is my shepherd … bless the little children … protect the meek …”

Esther appeared in the doorway. There was blood dripping from her nose onto her lips, and she was wavering on one leg. Her mama stood behind her with a crazed look still in her eyes. She looked at me and shoved Esther into the room with such force that Esther landed on her knees in the middle of the room where the nail polish bottle had been. “You come here,” she said to me.

I got to my feet slowly, already crying and still begging for mercy from God. Esther’s bloody nose and the angry red splotches on every part of her body that I could see, made it clear that her mama did not understand what it meant to be merciful. I stood before her pressing my hands together in a fisted version of praying hands.

“Put your hands down and look at me.”

Her voice was no longer human. But I had been trained to obey my elders. So I lowered my arms to my sides, eyes trained on the floor, still mumbling my prayers. “Look at me,” she said. What I saw when I raised my head was a matured hatred directed straight at me. Then I thought I saw a flicker of joy or forgiveness in the dark eyes that looked down into my own, so I didn’t expect the hand that swung out from her side and struck me across the face, knocking me off balance. Her other hand came from the other side to deliver the real blow that sent me reeling across the room. I bumped into Esther where she was still kneeling on the floor. We ended in a tangled heap on the pallet.

“That’s for not telling me what that dumb-ass bitch was up to.”

As Esther and I sat up and collected ourselves, wiping tears, snot, and blood from our faces with our hands, her mama tossed two folded brown paper bags at us. “Put your shit in these bags and get out of my house. I don’t want either one of you under the same roof with me for another minute.”

In silence we stuffed our things into the bags and stood in the middle of the room, waiting for some miracle to take us away. Esther’s mama appeared in the doorway again. “Y’all know the way to the door. Get your little asses out of my house.”

With faces averted and minds burdened with guilt and pain, we walked to the door, off the porch, and into the street. The quiet night air soothed my burning skin as I turned and began marching in the direction I thought would take me home. The stinging pain in my jaw and a sharp ache in my wrist dulled as I allowed myself to think about the fact that I didn’t know exactly how to get myself home. In my bruised memory the cab ride to Esther’s mama’s house had gone on forever.

Esther walked beside me, her shoulders slumped in a posture I had never seen her wear. Her eyes looked at the tips of her toes. We had neglected to put on our shoes.

“Esther?” I ventured, suddenly filled with fears about rabid bats swooping down on us, or wild possums attacking as we roamed around town, forever trying to find our way home.

She looked at me with an expression so empty and bewildered that I could not form the words to ask if she knew how to get to her grandma’s house. She turned her attention back to the ground, and I was content for a time to just walk beside her.

I could not imagine what it felt like to be Esther. I felt sorry that someone so powerful as her mother could hate her so much, and I was embarrassed to have seen proof of it. I stole sly glances at her face, moving there in the dark, as emotionless as something carved from stone.

After we had walked for a long time, Esther stopped under a streetlight and sat down on the ground with her back against the light pole. She set her bag on the ground beside her. Slow silent tremors began to shake her body, gently at first. Then the tremors strengthened, making her moan and shake violently. Her head dropped forward and her heavy plaits stuck out from her head like tired horns. As her shoulders heaved in her private anguish, I stood paralyzed in the street lamp’s murky yellow light.

I decided to try hugging Esther as my mother did with my little brothers when they cried. Esther shrugged my hand away savagely when I touched her shoulder.

After a while she stood and wiped her face on the hem of her night shirt. I didn’t realize that I had been crying until she looked at me and hissed, “I told you I hate crybabies.”

“Help me untie my hair,” she said suddenly, pulling roughly at one of her plaits. “These things are making my head hurt.”

We unbraided her hair carefully, and she ran her fingers through it, coaxing it back to its familiar wildness until it stood out angrily, dwarfing her narrow face.

“I didn’t want to stay at my mother’s house no way,” she said, reaching up with both hands to tug at the little hairs on the back of her neck. “She’s always trying to get me to come stay with her. But even though she loves me, I just don’t like to stay with her.”

A voracious sense of loss clawed at my insides. It tore at my stomach until I dropped to my knees and vomited in the dirt. I didn’t want to look at Esther. Something was wrong with her and her mother. I saw this as clearly as I saw the purple remnants of mulberry cobbler in the vomit on the ground in front of me. I felt weak, and I understood why she hated my kind of weakness. I didn’t want to get up.

Esther simply grabbed my nightshirt and pulled me to my feet.

“It’s a good thing that you ain’t me,” she said with disgusted pity. “Come on,” she added, gentler. “Let’s go find my grandma’s house. She’ll be glad to see us. She didn’t want me to go to my mama’s house no way.”

I don’t remember how, but we did find our way home, and neither Esther’s grandmother, nor my mother was glad to see us.

“I can’t believe you acted a fool in somebody else’s house. I thought you had better sense than that,” Momma said, clucking her tongue against the roof of her mouth and shaking her head with confused anger. “I know I taught you better than that.”

She put her hand under my chin and tilted my head to get a better look at my bruised cheek.

“That heifer didn’t have to hit you so hard. But now you know. Don’t go behaving like a fool in another woman’s house. Even when I ain’t around, you got to act sensible. Like you got some manners. Like I been raising you. Don’t give nobody reason to think they got to hit you. Maddy. You ain’t a little child anymore. You got to learn the world ain’t a easy place. You my pride and joy—don’t be giving me no reasons to be shamed of my own flesh and blood.”

I wanted to say I was sorry—sorry for shaming her, sorry for thinking Esther was better. I wanted to tell her about the hate I had seen in Esther’s mother’s eyes. I wanted to ask her if it was possible, could a mother really hate her child? But my tongue was tied by shame. I watched her making poultices for me to hold against my bruised face and wrist. And for the first time that summer I noticed her swollen legs. They looked like smooth brown tree trunks planted in a pair of Daddy’s old work-boots. She moved slowly, listing from side to side as she walked from the cabinet to the sink and back to the kitchen table where I sat. Her fingers, when she pressed the pungent-smelling remedy against my cheek, were like stiff little sausages.

“Hold it like this,” she said, flattening the cloth on my cheek. “If you keep it still, and the pressure even, it’ll stop hurting.”

When I looked in her eyes I saw enough anguish and grief to swallow my whole world.

Ma Parker wouldn’t let Esther and me play together for a full week. When we did try to play together like before, everything was awkward and false—our movements, our games, our speech. Neither of us ever brought up what happened the night we visited her mother’s house, but I was always thinking about it whenever I was with her. I was embarrassed for her still—the shame of her mother’s violence toward her, her delusions and lies about it. I couldn’t will myself back to a place or time when I didn’t know that there was another side to her life.

I began to look forward to the once-dreaded end of summer. I was happy a week or so later when that blue-and-white Chevrolet pulled up in front of Esther’s grandma’s house. I hid in my mulberry tree when she came looking for me to say good-bye, but she knew me well enough to climb up and find me. She draped herself nearby on a sturdy branch and swung her long legs casually.

“Will you help me pick some of your mulberries to eat in my auntie’s car?” she asked.

There was that familiar flinty hardness in her eyes, playing there like tiny bursts of sunlight when I looked at her.

“Ain’t no more mulberries,” I said sadly. “We ate all the berries a long time ago, remember?”

“Oh yeah,” she said, gazing out through mulberry leaves braised by the late August sun. “Oh yeah,” she repeated. “Your mulberries been gone a long, long time.”

“Esther!” Ma Parker’s voice soared on the hot air and found us in our green sanctuary.

“Well,” Esther said. “Got to go.”

She started her descent, and I climbed down after her to be gracious.

“My mama does love me, you know,” she said, her wild mane of hair fanning out around her face like blackberry bramble as she got into the backseat of her Aunt Helen’s boyfriend’s car.

Not knowing what else to do, I nodded slowly, then stood there and watched as they drove away.