JEWEL (37 page)

There’d been no one to hear them, only my daughter. But they were the best words I knew I could speak right then, could pass on to my daughter. This was why we were here, Brenda Kay, and that gray house with the white trim and big porch.

I held her hand tight, felt my palms begin to go wet, and I pulled her up. Brenda Kay turned in the seat and placed her white shoes out onto the curb, and stood.

“There, ” I said. “There, ” and I looked at her. She still had no look in her eyes, her mouth clamped shut for whatever reason. I said, “Now give us a smile here, ” and reached to her hair again, tucked a single thin strand of it back behind her ear. JEW I, L “Let’s see a smile, ” someone said from behind me, and I quick turned, startled at the sound of a different voice out here.

A nigger woman stood there on the sidewalk, in front of her a baby carriage. She was looking at Brenda Kay, smiling, and I could feel my own smile trying to come up on me, trying to make its way onto my face.

I said, “Good morning, ” and thought I’d said it maybe too quick.

She nodded, our eyes meeting and holding a moment. She was a high yellow, but it was her hair I saw and took in first, straight, bobbed under at her shoulders, parted at the top in the middle. Then I saw what she had on, a pale lavender dress, pearl buttons up the front, a lavender belt at her waist, the skirt of the dress all flounced out and full. And she had on lavender high heel shoes.

She said, “You of course are with the Foundation, ” and, still smiling, nodded toward Brenda Kay. “We’re happy you folks are here.”

But her words weren’t meaning much to me just then, I only watched her lips moving, saw she wore deep red lipstick, saw, too, she had on rouge, and that her eyebrows’d been penciled in.

“Yes, we are, ” I struggled out, the words feeble and useless, I knew.

“At least we’re about to be, that is, ” I said. With the Foundation.”

“Mississippi, ” she said, and leaned back a little, nodded to the rear of the car. “I saw your plates, ” she said, and looked back at me.

“My grandfather was from Mississippi. Up around Oxford, I think.”

“Oh, ” I said, then said, “We’re from Purvis, down near to Hattiesburg, ” and found my breath was slow and shallow, me here on the street and talking to a nigger woman I’d never seen before, just passing the time of day. And her wearing clothes I’d never imagined I might wear.

Lavender shoes.

“Momma! ” Brenda Kay said, and I felt like her word was some sort of salvation, her demanding of me my attention, and I’d forced my smile again. “We’ve got to be getting to the Foundation, ” I said, however hollow I sounded. They were only words.

“Nice to see you, ” she said, and nodded. She pushed the carriage along again, a carriage shiny and new, the wheels as they turned making no sound at all, and suddenly I saw a picture of Cathe ral barefoot on the road out front the old house in Mississippi, one or another of her boys when they were babies bundled up in an old quilt and tied off on her back, a papoose there as she walked.

From across the street another woman’s voice shouted, “Dorinda, how’s little Leon? ” I looked, saw on the porch of a red brick house another nigger woman, this one in a bathrobe printed with all kinds of flowers.

She had her arms crossed against her chest, her hair cut short and curled. Her skin was a little darker than the one with the carriage, and I could see her smiling, her white teeth.

The one pushing the carriage, this Dorinda, called out, “He’s doing just fine. A little of the croup, but nothing this fresh air won’t help.”

“You call me, girl, ” the other woman hollered, and I watched as she went to the edge of the porch, stepped down to the concrete walk that went up the middle of the lawn, and bent over, picked up the newspaper Lying there.

“In a while, ” Dorinda called out, still pushing the carriage, and the woman with the robe waved, went back up on the porch, and disappeared inside.

They lived here.

I took Brenda Kay’s hand, my eyes looking everything over, wondering what could go on in this neighborhood, what caused niggers to live this way. There were four houses we had to pass, and I found as we walked along the sidewalk that the concrete suddenly seemed cracked and cracked, narrow strips of grass growing up between those cracks to make it look a little more shabby than when we’d driven up. And the green in the stucco of these homes seemed a shade heavier, the loose mortar even looser, though I knew it was all in my head, all me and my making up reasons why these niggers couldn’t live in such fine houses, when we ourselves lived in a house with a driveway not big enough to hold our car.

Each step I took seemed filled with a new and uneasy feeling, as though the world were breaking up beneath us as we moved. My life was being swallowed up more and more each day by this strange place, California, liquor stores and lawyers, two-piece swimsuits and luxurious niggertowns, at the center of it all my Brenda Kay and me, struggling with each step we took just to stand in the middle of this brand-new place.

Then we came to 2151, and I stopped, looked to left and right. This was it, the place where whatever’d start next in our lives was going to start.

I took Brenda Kay’s hand, held it tight, and we started up the walk, moved up the three steps and onto the porch. The door was a big oak affair, stained and beautiful, with a leaded glass window I couldn’t see through. Next to the door was a brass plaque, not much different than the one Leston and I’d walked up to and read at Dr. Basket’s office in New Orleans all those years back. But now we were at 2151

Adams, and this plaque was shiny and looked new, and held out to me a whole barrel full of promise, not like the somber fear Dr. Basket’s old and tarnished plaque had given me. This plaque read, The Exceptional Children’s Foundation Nathan White, Director Though there was a small black button on a switchplate next to the plaque, I didn’t want for whatever reason to push it, didn’t want to hear a doorbell sound through the glass before us. We were small, I suddenly saw, me only a cracker from Mississippi showing up here to the door with my retarded child, my Brenda Kay, and so I reached up a hand to the leaded glass, hesitated a moment longer just one more moment of this life, because who knew what would come next? Who knew, other than God up in heaven, what would come next?

I knocked. I looked at Brenda Kay, saw that single strand of hair fallen back out of place. How could I have missed it when I’d pulled back her hair this morning? I wondered, and I reached up, tucked it back behind her ear again, her eyes straight ahead, mouth still tight closed.

My hand still there at Brenda Kay’s hair, the front door opened up wide, and there stood yet another nigger woman, this one young and beautiful, high cheeks and a fine straight nose. Her hair was pulled back tight into a bun, and she had on makeup, too, and was smiling at us.

I took my hand down from Brenda Kay’s ear like I’d been caught red-handed at something. I swallowed. I tried to smile, tried and tried, and finally tore my eyes from her, glanced aside at that shiny plaque. I said, “We’d like to see Mr. White, if we could.”

She stepped back from the door, opened it even wider, and made a sweeping gesture with her free hand to lead us in. “Please, ” was all she’d said, and it sounded like a word from a movie the way she said it, her mouth all in a smile, her eyes smiling, too, really meaning it.

This from a nigger woman dressed in a white blouse with a high collar and a black skirt, and though I was glad she wasn’t all gussied up in lavender like the one on the street, already I was wondering if, were I to end up enrolling Brenda Kay here, she’d be in a class full of retarded nigger children.

She closed the door behind us, Brenda Kay’s hand in mine now, and said, “Do you have an appointment? ” I turned, faced her, said, “No, actually. We do not.” I glanced at the floor, sparkling hardwood, buffed and polished and gleaming, a shaft of morning light fell in through a window to my right and lit up the wood, and I could see in the air dust motes sailing and sailing, just hanging there in the air.

“Well then, ” she said, “we’ll see if we can’t get you in to see him.”

She paused, and I looked up, saw she was looking at Brenda Kay.

“My name’s May, ” she said to her, and Brenda Kay looked to me a moment, just like she always did, then back to the woman.

“This here is Brenda Kay Hilburn, ” I said, and reached out, touched my daughter’s arm. “I’m her momma, ” I said, “Mrs. Jewel Hilburn.

We just moved here not a long time ago, a couple months. The people over to the National Association for Retarded Children said we’d do best to come see y’all.” S “Hey! ” Brenda Kay said, and smiled. Then she looked at me, said, “Thedral, Momma! ” and turned back to May.

“No, ” I said to her, “not Cathe ral, ” and I was surprised at how she’d remembered her from three years past. There hadn’t been talk of her even allowed in our house.

I turned to the woman, saw she had a puzzled look behind the smile she held. I smiled, said, “She’s talking about Cathe ral, a nigger woman who took care of her when she was little. Back in Mississippi.”

She lost the smile as soon as that word niggenvoman crossed my lips, and I knew right then it was the wrong word, though I’d never in my life felt any kind of embarrassment at uttering it. But I knew it was the wrong word, here in the foyer of a fine home in Los Angeles in a nigger neighborhood, a foyer suddenly too much like Missy Cook’s old place in Purvis, a few feet away a staircase ran up to a landing at a window that looked, I imagined, out onto the back yard, and I thought a moment on seeing my and my momma’s clothes burned in the pecan orchard back of Missy Cook’s house, and on my momma’s rocker going up in flames, too. To my left was what looked like it’d been a dining room, big windows looking out on the front yard, chairs spread against the walls, to my right was a smaller room with a big oak desk, on it stacks of paper, a blotter, a telephone, a lamp, next to it, on a smaller table, was a typewriter.

And as I took all this in, I realized what I was really doing, avoiding the eyes of this woman, May.

“Okay, ” May said. She turned from us, headed into the room with the desk. Once behind it she smiled again, pointed to the room behind us, where the chairs sat. “You can have a seat, and we’ll see what we can do.”

I nodded, smiled, turned to Brenda Kay. We two moved into the dining room, where in one corner, next to the window, stood a potted tree, something I hadn’t seen from the foyer. Brenda Kay walked l . s right over to it, took one of its small leaves in her hand, rubbed it between her fingers. I sat on the smallest, hardest chair I could find, some sort of punishment I couldn’t figure out why I was giving myself.

From where I sat I had clear view into the parlor across the foyer, and to May, who was half-turned from us, the telephone to her ear. She was talking low into it, and then she stopped, listened a moment, nodded.

She had a pen in her hand, was writing something on a piece of paper on the desktop. Then she smiled, her eyes on the piece of paper in her hand, and said one more word, hung up the phone.

“Mr. White will see you now, ” she said, and stood. “He’s only got a few minutes while the children finish up with morning exercise. Then he’ll have to be back in the classroom.”

I stood, went to Brenda Kay, still at the tree, and took hold her hand.

Then we were in May’s office, her leading us to a door to my left.

She opened the door for us, and our eyes met, the two of us smiling, and for one last moment I wondered whether this Mr. White himself was a nigger, the irony of his name right there in my face, Mr. White, and I wondered if that wasn’t what she’d been smiling at all along.

I led Brenda Kay into a room with potted plants all around, in the windows and against the walls, and there in the center of the room sat a desk bigger than May’s, Mr. Nathan White perched on the corner of it.

He was white. Too white, in fact, he was pale and thin, his forehead high and pasty. He had the thinnest moustache, too, and wore a white dress shirt and red tie, tan vest and pants, and I couldn’t help but feel as we walked into the room for the very first time that here was a white boy, out to impress us with his maturity and poise, what with the way he sat there on the desk.

“Be seated, ” he said, and pointed to two chairs in front of the desk.

I led Brenda Kay to the chairs, and we did as we were told, sat down, me on the edge, my back as straight and proper as I could make it, knees together, hands on my purse in my lap, Brenda Kay leaning forward in her seat, her hands clasped. She was already slowly rocking forward and back, and I said, “This is Brenda Kay Hilburn. She’s eight years old, nine in October.” I paused. He looked at her, but wasn’t smiling.

Instead, he had a finger to his chin, started tapping it.

I said, “I’m Jewel Hilburn, ” and I smiled even harder, hoping he might take it up, me not certain what Brenda Kay was up to, her with that rocking. She was watching him, waiting. Just as I was.

“We moved here two months ago from near Purvis, Mississippi.” I paused.

He smiled, nodded sharply. “Briefly, ” he said, and cut his eyes over to me, “let me tell you what we’re about. We will test your child, let you know what level we perceive her learning abilities might reach. We test our children each year, determine areas in which they might excel.

And we teach them. There are two classes here, one for the younger children, like your Brenda Kay, a class taught by Mrs. Becky Hamby, in whom I have all faith, the second class consists of older children, teenagers. I teach them. We are both authoritative and gentle in our approach. Firm and careful.” His voice was big for him, as if maybe he’d taken voice lessons somewhere in his life, and felt it necessary to use what he’d learned. It wasn’t unpleasant, wasn’t intimidating in any way I could see, Brenda Kay was still rocking just a little, but now her eyes were gone wandering, looking at the plants in the pots around the room.

“You go ahead and have a look around, ” he said. “Go on, Brenda Kay.

You can touch them if you want.”