HOLDING ON
A Parable of Faith and Strength
Strategic Book Publishing and Rights Co.
Copyright © 2013
All rights reserved – Jo Evans Lynn
No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping, or by any information storage retrieval system, without the permission, in writing, from the publisher.
Strategic Book Publishing and Rights Co.
12620 FM 1960, Suite A4-507
Houston, TX 77065
www.sbpra.com
ISBN 978-1-62516-994-5
DEDICATION
To Gloria D. Evans, my sister and my best friend, I never would have made it without God and you in my life.
PROLOGUE
The First Monday in October 1936
“What’s your name?” The teacher looked down her almost flat nose and twisted her sausage thick lips in disgust at the tiny girl. This child was surely not old enough to be starting first grade.
“Sister,” the little girl said. She did not know why the teacher had such a disapproving look on her face. Lifting her chin, she threw her shoulders back and pulled herself up to her full two and a half feet in height. Grandma Hester said, “Looking short was a state of mind.” Sister had to admit that at just over four feet tall Grandma Hester never “looked” short next to anybody.
“I mean your real name, Girl.”
“Sister Fullmore,” the little girl peered up at the teacher puzzling over how someone too dense to understand such a simple statement could be a teacher. Sister was all she’d ever been called. If it wasn’t her name, she didn’t know what was.
“Does anyone know this child?” the teacher asked the class. She didn’t try to keep her disgust from showing.
It was her fault that the brightest teacher in her graduating class from Tuskegee Institute had gotten stuck in a back-water school in Salley, South Carolina, but she would spend the rest of her career taking it out on the children in this hick town.
She followed her college beau to Salley-certain he would marry her once he had a job, but he took one look at Julia Mae James, another teacher at the school, and forgot all those words of undying love he’d been spreading out like a blanket of lust for them to crawl under during the last two years.
“She has some brothers in the upper school,” a boy volunteered.
“Go get one of them.” The teacher stared down at the child, “Fullmore? Are you Alton Fullmore’s child?”
“Yes, Ma’am,” Sister said proudly.
“I should have guessed. He’s the only one I know round here dumb enough to raise a child that doesn’t even know her own name.”
“My Daddy ain’t dumb. Mama says he just thinks things through ‘fore he says anything. She says it took him six days worth of courting to ask her to marry him.”
Sister knew why people thought her Daddy was dumb. There were times when being referred to as the “Poor Fullmores” made her wonder at the intelligence of a man who would get drunk enough to sell his birthright. Her father’s birthright had been one that included half of the only Colored funeral home in Salley, South Carolina and a farm that was so large at one time that his father had been able to give the land for Okey Spring Baptist Church and for the Colored School and still have the largest farm between there and Columbia. Sister having doubts about her father and allowing anyone to talk about him to her face was a different matter entirely. Sister was getting more than a little ticked off.
“Child, are you carrying on a conversation with me like you’re grown? If I say he’s dumb, he’s dumb.” She grabbed the girl’s arm, pulled her right hand open flat and slapped it twice with a ruler. “He is dumb,” she drew each word out as long as a single sentence.
“Ma’am just because you’re a teacher…”
“Sister, shut up,” her brother Oscar arrived just in time, “Ma’am, her name is Sister. Sister Fullmore, Ma’am.”
“You are just as dumb as you are ugly Oscar Fullmore. Nobody names a child Sister. You two are trying to pull something over on me. You got me wasting time trying to find out one child’s name when there are children here who want to learn. Put your hands flat on that desk and lean over,” she was so angry that her voice was trembling as she reached for the paddle that always stood sentinel next to her desk.
Oscar didn’t cry, and Sister didn’t either when it was her turn.
“Now, what’s her name?”
“Sister,” they said in unison.
“Well, I… I…” the teacher sputtered as she raised the paddle again.
“It’s Mary. Her name is Mary Fullmore,” Sister’s oldest brother Aaron rushed into the classroom. Someone had gone to get him while the teacher was whipping Oscar and Sister.
“No, it ain’t,” Sister wasn’t about to let him get away with giving her Baby Jesus’ mother’s name.
“Mary,” the teacher repeated as she added the name to her roll, totally ignoring Sister. “What’s her middle name?” She turned with a smile for the handsome young man. The first time she set eyes on him; she wanted to hate him because he was Julia Mae’s child and because it was clear to anyone who knew Clark Mobley that Aaron was her old beau’s son, but Aaron had so much personality, was so talented, and so eager to learn that he became her favorite student.
“It’s, it’s… Helen. Mary Helen,” Aaron added although he wasn’t sure he’d ever known her middle name, but since he knew that everyone had at least one middle name. He gave Sister one.
“Come here Sister,” he pulled her to the side. “Keep quiet. Do as you’re told. These people ain’t like Mama and Daddy. They won’t stand for you sassing back, talking like you’re grown.”
“I wasn’t sassing. I was just…”
“It’s sassing here. That’s the first lesson you got to learn in school. Keep your thoughts to yourself. You can’t tell stuff to grown folks like you do children.”
He understood her frustration. He felt it too when he started school six years ago at the age of eight. Since he was always big for his age, his father put him to work on the farm until a Truant Officer showed up one day and took him right out of the field. No one ever heard of a Truant Officer coming to get a Colored child even though the South Carolina State Education Law said that all children had to be enrolled in school by age seven. Even their mother didn’t know why the Truant Officer came. She was just glad that someone took the matter out of her hands, and Aaron was happy to get to go to school.
Julia Mae James Fullmore had been called a “modern” school teacher before she married their father. She spanked them only for the very worst infractions and talked them around to doing the right thing the rest of the time.
This worked with him, and Albert Lee, the two older brothers, but with Oscar, Sister and Claretha, it led them to believe that all adults were capable of discussing matters other than serious infractions with children. Clearly a fallacy he would have to straighten out before she ended up getting as many whippings as Oscar had his first year of school. Aaron didn’t want her spirit broken like Oscar’s had been. He could not imagine Sister with her eyes down, saying, “Yes, Ma’am” to everything a teacher said or anyone else for that matter. How could he make her understand?
“Sister, you want to make a good impression the first day of school and saying too much to the teachers isn’t a good idea.”
“Why?” Sister’s voice pulled him back into the present. “Why?” she repeated. It seemed a reasonable question to Sister.
“Why?” Aaron lowered his voice even more, “Cause they grown that’s why.”
“Mama and Daddy are both grown, and they let me tell them whatever I want. Anyway, Grandma Hester says that I can say whatever I want as long as it’s the truth as I see it.”
“Not here, at school they got their own set of rules.”
“That don’t make no sense, but I’ll do it to keep peace,” Sister finished after seeing the serious big brother look on Aaron’s face.
Sister would soon find that it would take more than keeping her thoughts to herself to keep the peace.
Contents
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-one
Chapter Twenty-two
Chapter Twenty-three
Chapter Twenty-four
Chapter Twenty-five
Chapter Twenty-six
Chapter Twenty-seven
Chapter Twenty-eight
Chapter Twenty-nine
Chapter Thirty
Chapter Thirty-one
Chapter Thirty-two
Chapter Thirty-three
Chapter Thirty-four
Chapter Thirty-five
Chapter Thirty-six
Chapter Thirty-seven
Epilogue
Chapter One
Oscar was about sick of Sister. She’d been a thorn in his side since the first day of school three years ago. In spite of the fact that she had too much mouth, there was something about Sister that the teacher liked. It could have been the fact that she was a whiz in math and could help with some of the younger kids. No matter what it was like all the other adults, the teacher let Sister act grown as he was.
Part of behaving like one of the older kids was coming out to play with them. Not only did he have to contend with having two older brothers who were so good looking that girls about fainted over them, now he also had folks picking on him because Sister could best him in any game. She could run faster, hit a baseball farther and pin him when they wrestled.
Now, she was taking being a pest too far. She’d started to follow Aaron and him everywhere they went. He wasn’t going to put up with it.
“Sister you can’t go with us,” Oscar grouched. He tried to look down his nose at her, but it was hard to do because she was only a couple of inches shorter than he was. God had finally answered one of his prayers- not to have sister grow taller than him. Their younger sister Claretha who was three years his junior had out grown him by half a foot last year, which only left Sister and the one year old Luke, shorter than him.
“Why not?”
“Cause we’re going to be doing man things.”
“Y’all ain’t no men.”
“I don’t know about Oscar, but Aaron sure is a man,” Rose Hempshire put in as she slid her arm through Aaron’s.
She was beaming with pride. All the girls wanted to be with Aaron Fullmore- at least one time and this was her first and perhaps only time. He didn’t have a reputation for sticking with any woman, but every woman he’d been with would be willing to take him back on any terms. It wasn’t just looks either. He was hard working, smart, and he knew how to make a woman feel special.
There was even talk that Aaron wasn’t Alton Fullmore’s son, which was a mark in his favor. He had his mother’s high yellow complexion, and wherever he’d gotten that jet black curly hair from- the way it waved made it real easy to say “yes” to anything he asked.
“Shut up Rose. There ain’t going to be no man things going on tonight unless going to the movies is a man thing,” Sister spoke to Rose, but she turned to look directly at her brother. “Aaron, you promised I could go to the movies this week,” Sister gave Aaron her sweetest little girl look.
Oscar’s heart dropped. He knew when Sister turned those enormous brown eyes up at Aaron he’d give in and let her go. Thus, ruining any chance he had of getting over with Rose’s cousin tonight.
“Aaron, don’t let her come,” Oscar pleaded.
“A promise is a promise, and she did save the breast of the chicken for me last Sunday when Rev. Covington came over for dinner,” Aaron pulled one of Sister’s thick plaits.
Oscar couldn’t argue with that. Getting any part of the chicken other than the gizzard or the feet was a considerable accomplishment when Rev. Covington came to dinner.
The itinerant preacher who served both the Okey Spring Baptist Church and Samarian A.M.E. Zion church counted the Sunday dinners that the local Colored families took turns preparing for him as the best part of what little he got paid, and he always ate and carried enough food away to last him well into the next week.
Oscar could tell that Rose was even madder than he was. They walked all the way in to Salley without Rose saying another word.
Not getting any men’s things done tonight didn’t mean a thing to Aaron. He wasn’t all that hot for Rose, not like Oscar was for her cousin.
He almost changed his mind about letting Sister go with them when he remembered this, but a promise was a promise no matter who was inconvenienced. He didn’t much care whether or not Rose ever spoke to him again- there were too many women out there to let any one woman get on his last good nerve. He’d find a way to make it up to Oscar.
The Fulmer’s owned the only theater for Colored people in the county. It was built of raw lumber in 1922, and by 1940, it looked as though it was 100 years old. A high center section looked like an “A” squatting on the corner of Stack Road, the main street of the Colored section of town. Lower wings on each side of the building contained the concession stands on one side and exceedingly modest indoor facilities on the other side. It was more of a barn than a real movie theater like the White folks had but to the young Colored people of Salley, South Carolina it was a place to go courting on Saturday night with little or no interference from grown folks.
Oh, the grown folks knew the kinds of shenanigans that went on in the theater and in the woods between there and home on Saturday nights during the summer and early fall, but if it would keep the young men on the farms long enough for the next batch of children to get old enough to work, then what was the harm?
If a girl just happened to get pregnant, then that was even better because the boy either would marry the girl and end up spending the rest of his life scratching out a living on the farm or the boy would run off and the girl would end up working in somebody’s house and sending money home to her family for the baby.
“Why’s your hair plaited?” Aaron asked Sister.
“Mama said she didn’t know how long she’d be in the hospital this time, and she didn’t want me running around looking like a hoyden.”
Sister knew her hair was one of her best features. It hung down her back in an odd blend of black and reddest brown, wavy like the Oceesi River on a summer night. It was a thick mixture of hair that gave testimony to the truth of the stories her Grandma Hester told about White masters mixing their blood with the royal West African blood of their slaves’ ancestors.
Sometimes Aaron would tease Sister about her hair.
He’d say, “Sister, when I find a woman with hair like yours, I’ll settle down with her awhile.”
This evening though, Aaron wasn’t in a teasing mood. All his thoughts were serious thoughts about his mother.
“Oh,” was all he said.
Although Aaron tried to keep his worry hidden, Sister knew why his answer was so short. They were all worried about their mother. When she had their baby brother Luke last year, they kept her in the hospital for three whole days during harvest time. No Colored woman laid-up in the hospital for three whole days unless she was sick unto death. Sure, there was something called a laying-in period when a woman could not cook because the flow of blood after the birth of a child made her unclean, but no woman actually laid around. There was too much work other than cooking to do.
Grandma Hester was madder than all get out when their mother came up pregnant this last time. She was the local root woman. When she’d learned that the doctor told Julia Mae that she should not have any more children, she gave her daughter a bitter powder and told her to put it in her husband’s food.
Julia Mae was too soft-hearted to do it. She told her mother, “I can’t take his manhood away from him. That’s about all he’s got left.”
Julia Mae wouldn’t even insist that Alton allow her mother to serve as a midwife for her this time around. Hester James let everyone know that Alton was a fool to spend good money on a hospital when she had delivered babies for over fifty years and hadn’t lost a single mother.
Alton Fullmore wanted only the best for Julia Mae. He still couldn’t believe that a soot-black man like him could win the hand of the only high yellow belle among the James girls. Everyone said Daisy was the real beauty among the five James girls, but Daisy was too bossy and too full of herself for Alton Fullmore. He couldn’t give Julia Mae much, but he could give her a hospital and real birth certificates for each of their children.
He didn’t care that three months after he married Julia Mae she confessed that the baby she was carrying wasn’t his. Another man might have killed a woman who tricked him into marriage like that, but Alton knew that she might not have given him a second look if she had not been knocked up. The way he figured it, it was that pretty-boy school teacher’s loss and his gain.
So, every time Julia Mae started labor, Alton got her to the nearest Colored hospital. It was easy with Aaron, Albert Lee, Oscar, Sister, and Claretha because he was a wandering farmer and all his other children were born in Florida or Georgia near good sized towns, but Julia Mae wanted to come home to Salley, South Carolina. He fought coming back for as long as he could fight against coming back. He knew that anywhere within 100 miles of Salley was Hester James’ territory and in her territory everyone did what she told them to do.
Alton Fullmore rebelled. He grew up under a despot father who still ruled the Fulmer’s with an iron fist. No one had bossed him since he refused to go up to Columbia and learn to be a mortician and his father disowned him. Everyone thought he felt awful about having to earn his own way, but being free of the old man was better than getting five dollars a week pay. It was worth changing his name to Fullmore and bearing the jokes to be free of the old man.
Working hard and being poor didn’t bother him the way it bothered Julia Mae and the children. Julia Mae was accustomed to a better life.
She was the belle of a family of strong women. Julia Mae was college educated, and her mother was the matriarch of a family that was the closest to African-American royalty former slaves would ever achieve. The old house where Julia Mae lived as a child had the stately columns that heralded roots that sunk as deep as those of the three hundred year old trees that surrounded the house.
Aaron stood there for awhile thinking about his parents. No one spoke because everyone knew that this was his way.
Aaron would stop in the middle of a conversation or a job-stand still for a time and then say something so profound that everyone would wonder why no one had ever seen things exactly that way before. Then sometimes he wouldn’t say anything at all. At other times, he would just start back talking as though he had not been silently standing there for a few long moments.
When Aaron came back to himself, he said, “Don’t look sad like that Sister. Mama is going to be all right,” Aaron smiled his reassurance.
“Promise?” Sister knew Aaron never promised anything that he couldn’t deliver on and if he promised their mother would be all right she would be all right.
Aaron didn’t look at her when he said, “Tell you what, I’ll go over to Springfield tomorrow and find out when she’s coming home.”
It wasn’t until later that night as she lay awake still worrying that Sister realized that Aaron hadn’t promised her that their mother would be all right.
“Okay, let’s go,” Aaron turned and started to walk in the direction of the movie. He stopped and looked back when he realized that only Sister had fallen into step beside him. Oscar and Rose stood there looking as though they’d put more than they intended to in the offering plate at church.
“If y’all are going to look like that, y’all can go back home, and me and Sister will go to the movie.”
“Oh, Aaron, I’m not mad, just disappointed. This should not count as my stepping out with you. Promise me next Saturday night,” Rose pleaded.
“I can’t do that, all my Saturday’s straight through Easter of next year are taken. You want to come or not?”
“I’ll go,” There was still the woods after the movie. Maybe she could get Aaron to take Sister back home first.
Rose was even more disappointed when Aaron took her home first and rushed off saying he had to get to bed early.
Aaron was up before the sun was up. He thought he rolled out of bed quietly enough not to wake the other three occupants of the bed- his three younger brothers. He almost jumped out of his skin when he found a fully dressed Oscar standing at the foot of their bed.
“What are you doing up this early?”
“Going with you.”
“No, you’re not. You know Daddy can’t spare both of us.”
“He can’t spare either of us. You know Albert Lee ain’t much good for work, but if we leave now we can maybe catch a ride back with someone and be back by noon. I got to see if Mama’s all right.”
Since Oscar pressed his case by threatening to wake their father and thus prevent either of them from going, Aaron had to take him along.
Aaron knew that Oscar would want to use up the time during the seven mile walk into Springfield talking about the movie last night. Oscar could just about retell any movie that he saw word for word. Usually, Aaron found this talent and Oscar’s ability to mimic the voices of both men and women entertaining, but today Aaron’s mind was set on one thing- getting to Springfield and that hospital as fast as he could get there. Heck, Aaron couldn’t even remember what the movie last night was about. A wall of worry had clogged his ears and pressed down on his chest since that moment when he couldn’t get the words out to promise Sister that their mother would be all right.
Aaron didn’t want to talk. He didn’t want to walk. He wanted to run all the way there.
Chapter Two
“Aaron, you sure this is it?” Oscar’s voice was full of doubt as he looked up at the building.
This place didn’t look anything like the hospitals where their mother had given birth to their younger siblings. The Hospital for Colored People in Lake Alfred, Florida where Sister, Claretha and Luke had been born had a sign in front of it proclaiming it to have been the site of a Confederate Hospital from 1862-1864. In spite of being old, the walls were white washed, and the grounds were sparse but neat; it looked like a hospital. But this place looked as if it could have been almost anything-a stable, a country store, a Colored school house-anything but a hospital.
“We’re at the end of the road that man told us to follow and ain’t nothing else here where he said it would be, so I reckon this is it,” Aaron tried to sound positive that he was right, but it was hard when faced with a building that seemed a complete contradiction of the term “hospital” .
It was a clapboard building with a front that might have been painted bright yellow forty or fifty years ago. But now, the building looked faded and tired much like the buildings in those small Western towns, in the movies. Aaron expected to see a bartender and a couple of dance hall girls on the other side of the doors. Why hadn’t their father turned around and taken their mother back home to Grandma Hester the moment he saw this place?
“Maybe it’s better on the inside,” they said in unison both making a half hearted attempt at laughing as they shared a “running joke.”
Each time they approached the latest shack that their father had rented for them or that his current employer supplied for the farm laborers who lived on his farm, their mother would attempt to raise their spirits by saying, “Maybe it looks better on the inside.”
It never did.
This time it was better. The floor was of polished slate and the walls gleamed with fresh white wash. It smelled and looked clean. There was a woman who looked even older than their Grandma Hester sweeping the already clean floor. An older man who had the proud bearing of a butler greeted them.
“The doctors don’t usually allow visitors this early in the day,” the old man said as his eyes swept from Aaron to Oscar, and then back to Aaron. After years of service, he recognized who was in charge. It had nothing to do with height but with the way each young man carried himself. The tall one knew who he was and liked being that person. The small one was still looking for himself because he didn’t much like the part of himself that he had found.
“We just want to look in on our Mama,” Aaron spoke up.
“And your mother is?”
“Julia Mae Fullmore.”
“She wasn’t in her bed this morning when I came in a little while ago. I thought she and her baby had gone home.” In another hour, he would be caught up on what had happened yesterday and during the night while he was working at the gentleman’s club.
“We just came from home. She ain’t there. Where’s our Mama!” Aaron grabbed the man by his collar and lifted him about six inches from the floor.
Sister looked up from the washboard, wiping the sweat from her brow, she could see someone walking up the road, but they were too far away for her to tell who it was. Not that she much cared who it was. Whoever it was looked like a man, and she knew no man around here was going to help her with what she needed to do.
She didn’t know how her mama did it. Mama could get more done in a day than Sister had gotten done in nearly a week.
The day her mother went to the hospital she washed clothes, cleaned the house, cooked the noon day meal for five men, made sure Sister’s and her sister Claretha’s hair was washed and plaited so tight that their eyes were slanted like Chinese children, and made her children’s favorite checker-board cake.
Sister was trying her best, but she was just ten years old and smaller than most six year old children. She didn’t resent the fact that, as the oldest girl, she had to do all her mother’s chores while she was in the hospital, but sometimes she wished that their father would make Claretha help her. There weren’t, but ten months between them and Sister had been doing a woman’s work since she was seven years old.
She understood that Claretha was the “one” - the only one who would be able to go to school beyond the six-grade school for Colored Children in Salley. Poor sharecropping families could afford only to spare one child to finish school and become a teacher or a preacher. That one had to be deemed the best and the brightest among the children in the family, and although everyone knew that Aaron was the best and brightest among the Fullmore children, somehow it had always been understood that he would not be the one. Aaron and Albert Lee had left school after sixth grade. Sister thought that Aaron had not been allowed to continue in school because he was so strong and hard working- often picking two-times as much cotton as anyone else. She would be a grown woman before she learned the real reason why Claretha had been tapped as “the one” instead of Aaron.
So, Claretha got to go to school every day and stay late after school with the teacher for extra lessons while Sister missed weeks of school at a time when their mother had a baby or during planting or harvest time when she had to work in the fields or help her mother cook the big meal of the day.
“Standing here wool-gathering and feeling sorry for myself ain’t getting these clothes washed,” Sister scolded herself as she bent down to slap another of the men’s shirts against the washboard in the creek.
She hated washing clothes in this creek. It was a poor excuse for a creek. It held barely enough water in it to call it a creek because it had been nearly bone dry since June- hardly a drop of rain. What little water there was in the creek was bracken grey, and the clothes washed in it never looked as clean as her hard work should have made them look.
But going to the river to wash with the other women would add another two hours to her wash-time and Sister didn’t have an extra two hours to spend doing anything.
“Sister, Sister! Didn’t you hear me calling you?”
She looked up as the man she’d seen way down the road suddenly became her brother Oscar.
“No, I didn’t hear you. I don’t have time to talk. You and Aaron are in trouble anyway. Daddy said he didn’t give y’all permission to go see Mama.”
“Sister, Mama’s dead! That’s why I’m back here without Aaron. I came to tell Daddy. I came…”
She didn’t hear the rest of what he said. After her name, the next two words turned off the blood to her brain leaving her both deaf and dumb.
Her lips were moving, but nothing was coming out.
Finally, she asked, “Dead?” She said the one word like a question. She couldn’t put the two words together.
Mama. Dead. It didn’t make sense.
“Dead. When we got there, we couldn’t find her. Aaron went crazy-threatening to kill someone if they didn’t find our Mama,” he paused to catch his breath.
“Finally, this old black woman who was sweeping the floor said, “She bled to death. I told them Julia Mae was one of Hester James’ daughters, and they sent word to your Grandma that her daughter was dead. Miss Hester came and got the baby girl and had her son Boy take the body to the Fulmer Funeral Home.”
Telling this part of what he knew seemed to drain the last of Oscar’s meager strength. He sank down to the ground like an empty bag of potatoes as he broke down sobbing.
Sister reached out to touch his shaking shoulders, but her hand fell to her side inches away. She didn’t know how to comfort her brother. Crying wasn’t something the Fullmore children did much of because as their mother said, “Crying doesn’t do any good and most people look real ugly doing it.”
“Does Daddy know?” Sister asked when she could speak.
“I don’t know if Grandma Hester sent anyone over to tell him. You know she’ll blame him for Mama being dead because she didn’t want Mama to go to the hospital. Aaron sent me to tell Daddy just in case and to tell Daddy to meet him at the funeral home. You go tell Daddy. I can’t. I just can’t,” he said as he looked up at Sister. All the time he was crying dry, heart aching sobs.
This was just like Oscar. Sometimes, he acted as though Sister was the older of the two rather than the other way around. When they got into trouble, she took the blame, and when he needed something when Aaron wasn’t around, Sister was the one to ask for it. She’d always felt closest to him not only because he was nearly as short as she was, but because he needed her.
There was always something needy about Oscar, and it had nothing to do with the fact that he was short and ugly with not one redeeming feature. He’d never grown much hair and had a head start on being bald in his teens like other James’ men. Where all the other boys in the family had thick eyelashes long enough to make a woman weep with envy, Oscar’s eyelashes were as scarce as the hair on his head. His West African dark skin’ didn’t have the smooth look of melted chocolate like their other dark skinned brothers, Albert Lee and Luke. He had some kind of skin problem when he was six and their Daddy would not let Grandma Hester use any of what he called “her Mammy-made ointments” on him. So, instead of his face healing smooth like Uncle Boy’s children’s faces had when they had the same ailment, Oscar’s face healed with a rough crater appearance.
No, he’d never be handsome, but like a mother with an ugly duckling, Sister took him under her wing. She would have done anything at this moment to protect him from the hurt that seemed to be radiating from him right into her soul. The only way she could think to help was to go tell their father.
Dead. Mother. Dead. It didn’t make sense.
Chapter Three
Alton Fullmore didn’t stop his work for the noon day meal. He was too mad to eat. Early spring planting was hard enough without Aaron and Oscar going off like that. He’d saved enough seeds to plant plenty of watermelons and sweet corn to sell on the side of the road, and it would take all three of them working ten to twelve hours a day to plant enough to do what he wanted to do.
He looked over at Albert Lee. The boy tried, but he just wasn’t cut out to be a farm laborer any more than Alton had been cut out to be a mortician. Albert Lee was too much like him. The boy had been working on that same row for over three hours. He needed Aaron and Oscar.
This was the best chance in a long time he’d had to get Julia Mae the real house he’d been promising her for years. One of the families that owned a decent house in the Colored community-running water, two bedrooms, and a front room for company-was moving to Columbia. Their oldest daughter was a school teacher, and she’d found jobs for her father and brothers at a mill. Chances like this didn’t happen often in a town as small as Salley and Alton meant to get it right this time.
Wouldn’t the folks around here be surprised when he finally was able to put his family into a decent house? He frowned at the roof of the shack that was barely visible from this end of the field. His Julia Mae deserved better. Julia Mae was used to better. Her mother, Hester James was the matriarch of a family that was Colored aristocracy and the old house she lived in before he’d married her had stately columns and swap-around verandas that heralded its past as the main house of a Southern Plantation.
He smiled at his day dream until he looked up and saw Sister. He dropped his hoe and started running towards her. It had to be something real bad to make Sister leave her work.
“What are you doing out here, Sister? If you’ve come to explain why those sorry brothers of yours aren’t out here helping me, I don’t want to hear it,” he offered the simplest excuse he could think of.
“Oscar’s back, but I left him sitting on a stump crying over Mama.”
“That’s nothing new. Oscar always misses your Mama more than anyone else because she acts as if he’s the baby boy ‘stead of Luke.”
“That ain’t it. He’s crying because she’s dead,” Sister blurted it out like that out of anger, in part for the way he always talked about Oscar and the other part because every step of the way out here she got angrier and angrier about her mother being dead.
The doctor told her father when Luke was born that his wife shouldn’t have any more children, but her father said anything that kept a woman from getting pregnant was going against God’s will. And he said that he wasn’t going to allow Grandma Hester to give his wife anything to keep her from carrying his seed.
“Aaron said that you should meet him at Fulmer Funeral Home where Grandma Hester had them take Mama’s body,” Sister watched her father fold like an accordion and drop crying on top of a row of freshly planted watermelon seeds.
Sister didn’t offer him any comfort. She turned to go home to try to make their house look presentable. As bad as her mother being dead was, the fact that everyone would come to that shack that they called home for the wake and after the funeral for the family meal was even worst.
The traveling minister was the only one who had come near their house since they’d moved back to Salley. It was as though being dirt poor was contagious.
Although everyone was some kind of poor, most of the Colored people had at least one thing that separated them from being “dirt poor” - a wooden floor, running water in the house or a house garden with more than a few herbs-something. Their house had none of that.
The last time the minister came for Sunday dinner; her mother fed him out of a picnic basket on the front stoop claiming that the house was too hot from her cooking. No, Sister thought, her mother didn’t deserve to be laid out in a one room shack with a packed dirt floor and an outhouse so close you could hear every turd drop.
“She doesn’t look like she should be dead,” Oscar moaned against Sister’s shoulder as she practically held him up as the family was viewing the body for the last time before they closed the casket.
“That’s because she shouldn’t be. She should be home baking us a checkered-cake or teaching Little Luke how to count,” Sister couldn’t get the anger to make room for the hurt. It wasn’t fair that a woman had to keep having babies until she died from it just because her husband said so.
“Kiss your mama good-bye, Sister,” Grandma Hester said as she pried Oscar away from Sister.
“Grandma I…” Sister didn’t know how to say it. How could she admit to anyone that she did not want to kiss her Mama good-bye? All the other children, except Emma Margaret, the baby, had kissed their mother. Their father had kissed her. In fact, several of the men in the family had been forced to pull Alton Fullmore back from almost climbing into the casket with her.
They were waiting on Sister.
“Go on gal. There ain’t never been a James woman that was scared of another James woman living or dead.” Her grand-mother was too close to doing the unthinkable-disgracing herself by crying in public-to consider the ten-year-old’s feelings. Julia Mae had been her heart. She’d washed and ironed thousands of petticoats, shirt’s, fancy dresses, and anything else the White folks were willing to pay her to wash to send Julia Mae all the way into Columbia to become a teacher. And what happened? She gets knocked up by the first good-looking man that gives her the eye and then gets herself married to the only broke Fulmer in the county.
“I said go ahead and kiss your Mama good-bye, Sister.”
“I’m not afraid of Mama. It’s not that. It’s just…”
Sister gave up trying to explain as she moved closer to the casket. It was easier to lean down and kiss her mother’s cold, too firm cheek than to explain that what held her back was not fear, but a desire to keep in her heart the feeling of that warm embrace her mother gave her as she made her repeat one last time all the directions she had given her before leaving for the hospital.
That Mama-the one she wanted to feel in her soul at the end of each day was alive and warm and smelled of rose water, but instead after the kiss, she was left with the feeling of a Mama who was dead-cold hard dead.
“Sister, you ain’t supposed to be serving people. We’re the grieving family,” Aaron said as he accepted a plate loaded with fried chicken, potato salad and buttered biscuits.
Their grandmother had insisted that the wake and the family meal be served at her house, so there was plenty of room for all the people. Saying she insisted was actually giving Alton Fullmore more credit for taking part in the decision making than he deserved. From the moment she was told that her daughter was dead, Hester James went by the “till death do you part” line in the wedding vows as far as Alton Fullmore was concerned. He was nothing to her daughter now and he’d never been much more than “nothing” to Hester James. To her, Alton was just as dead as her daughter. She made all the decisions concerning her daughter.
“You know those folks hanging closest to the table are the ones that ain’t brought a thing, but will be eating like it’s their last meal whether they’re family or not. Sit here waiting to be served and you might starve,” Sister said as she sat on the floor and rested her head on the side of Aaron’s thigh.
“I’ll have you know little Miss Thing that this is my third plate.” He smiled and waved Silesia Jones away. “Thank you darling, but I think this plate is plenty.”
“You think you’re all that ‘cause all these silly girls fancy themselves in love with you,” Sister tried to say it like a put down, but too much pride in her older brother mixed in and spoiled the effect.
“I know I’m something. A man has got to know that about himself if he’s going to make it in this world. You’re something too little girl. You’re smart enough to do anything you want.”
“Being smart doesn’t mean anything around here. Who do you know smarter than Mama was? What good did it do her in the end? Round here, a girl-child is just somebody to work and have babies ‘til they die,” she threw the questions at him not expecting an answer.
“I’m not as smart as you and Mama, but I know there’s more to a woman than working and having babies.”
“Oh you just thinking about the fun you have between their legs.”
“Sister, I done told you about talking about things like that. It ain’t lady like.” Aaron looked around to make sure no one was close enough to overhear them. He admonished her simply because his mother had taught him that he was partly responsible for helping to raise the younger kids right, but when they were alone, he let Sister talk to him about most anything grown up or not. “Sister, I’m the last one to talk down on that part of a woman. It’s one of the two best things God ever made.”
“What’s the second one?” Sister asked even though she already knew the answer.
“Fried chicken,” Aaron declared as he took another bite out of the chicken breast. “I ain’t kidding Sister. Women might start out liking me because I’m good looking, but they keep liking me because I understand that there’s a lot more special about women than that. I am going to make sure that any man who wants to step out with you understands how special you are.”
“Special?”
“Yeah, real special, I…”
“Aaron come here,” Grandma Hester’s sharp command cut across the rest of what he had to say.
“Yes Ma’am.” Aaron stood up with a puzzled look on his face. Those three words were three more than his Grandma had ever said directly to him.
She led him out to the front porch before she said another word. “Go over to the house and get your things. Boy here is going to take you in to Columbia to get some work.”
“I got work right here Ma’am. Daddy needs me to finish spring planting, and the younger ones need…”
“He ain’t your Daddy. You old enough to have figured that out by now and it ain’t right asking a man to raise somebody else’s child. I told your Mama that ‘fore she married him. You’re grown now. Time to make your own way,” the old woman finished in an oak hard voice that didn’t leave room for debate.
The older people on the porch had gone quiet. Aaron was too embarrassed to argue or beg the old woman to let him stay. One look at the man who had raised him was enough to let him know that there was no help coming from that direction.
Sure, Aaron knew by now that he wasn’t Alton Fullmore’s natural son. There’d always been enough people to hint at it, and when he turned eight and still hadn’t started school, he asked his mother why. She explained that since he was so big for his age, Alton figured he could start earning his keep. She didn’t feel that she could object too hard because Alton had claimed him and treated him pretty good.
“Can I go say bye first?”
The old woman nodded in agreement.