Mrs. Bryant turned out to be the resident social worker, a white woman of about thirty, wearing an Indian-print dress and with a hairdo of untidy curls over a face with a receding chin and a mild, regretful expression, like that of a sheep. Mama handed her the package for Mrs. Jeller, and then all of us sat down. For a minute or two the old woman stared at Mama and me with bright eyes and an unsmiling mouth, still tossing back her hair with that petulant gesture; then she gave a small chuckle. “I can tell you all is mother and daughter,” she said. “They ain’t no way you could deny that.”
“Is that your mother over there in the picture, Mrs. Jeller?” asked my mother, indicating an almost indecipherable yellow daguerreotype of a woman that stood on a table beside the bed.
“Yes, ma’am, it is,” said Mrs. Jeller. “But she didn’t raise me. I came up the hard way.”
She moved laboriously backward on the bed and then stretched out her bare legs on the mattress until they lay stiffly in front of her like a doll’s legs. On the other side of the bed, the social worker had turned her mournful sheep’s face toward the silent television, where a game-show host, like a genie, conjured up prize after prize for a woman who seemed to be weeping with excitement.
“Oh, dear,” began my mother. “What a shame. How—”
“The hard way,” repeated Mrs. Jeller, striking the mattress with a loud whack. She flung her bushy hair back impatiently and turned to address me as if we were alone in the room. “How old are you, missy? Fifteen?”
“Sixteen,” I muttered, abashed. The sight of this wild old woman with the bare legs and shamelessly tossing breasts both disgusted and fascinated me; seeing her was shocking in a curiously intimate way, like learning a terrifying secret about myself.
Mrs. Jeller sat up a little straighter and went on staring at me. Her gaze was severe, as if she were about to chastise me for something. “You’re a pretty thing,” she said in a reproving tone, and was silent for a minute, her eyes glittering like two black beads in her dry brown face.
“Do you know, girl,” she continued abruptly, “that I had my first man—that a man first had his way with me—when I was twelve years old? Twelve years old!”
The old woman drew out these last three words into a plaintive wail that sounded like the voice of an abandoned child. As she spoke, she suddenly turned her head from me and began staring out of the window.
My mother gave a dry little cough and asked, “What town did you grow up in, Mrs. Jeller? Was it Philadelphia?”
Mrs. Jeller shook her head. “No, ma’am. It was out in the back of nowhere in Kentucky. Mama worked for the white folks, so I lived with Uncle Mills and Aunt Treece. They were country folks, and up until I was twelve, they kept me innocent. I was so innocent that when I first got Eve’s curse, my monthly flow of blood, I thought I had cut myself in the privy. I came running back to the house, shouting to my uncle and aunt, ‘I’ve hurt myself!’
“Aunt Treece took me upstairs and showed me the cloths I must use to catch the blood, and how I must boil and wash them. And Uncle Mills called me into the parlor and told me that now I was a woman, and from that night on, I must only take my pants down for two reasons—to wash, and to go to the privy.
“Both of them warned me never to allow any men or boys near me. But strict as they could be, a man did get to me. He was the brother of two girls who lived down the road. They were fast girls, bad girls, older than I was; they used to smoke little violet-colored cigarettes. They would always say ‘Come on!’ to me whenever they went places, and like a fool I’d go. And then their brother took to hanging around, and one night the girls left the two of us alone, and he did something to me. He hurt me, and I didn’t even know what it was he was doing. I ran home and didn’t stop to speak to my uncle and aunt—I just went right on up to bed and cried. Three weeks later my uncle looked at me and said, ‘Honey, you been with a man. Who was it?’
“I started to cry and told him all about it. It turned out that I had gotten a baby from that man, from just that one time. A man’s seed is a powerful thing. It wiggles and jumps until it gets where it’s going, even inside a child who was a virgin.
“The next morning my uncle went out, and when he came back, he said to me, ‘Hattie, we are going to have a wedding here, so go and invite whoever you want.’
“I invited my teacher from school, and a girl I played with from next door, and I stood in the parlor, and the preacher married me to that man—his name was John. And after that, John lived in our house, and slept in my room, though I hardly spoke to him. Oh, it was frightening, I tell you, to wake up with that strange head alongside of me on the pillow. One night he touched me, and I felt a leaping and a hopping inside of me, as if my baby was trying to come out. After that I wouldn’t let him touch me. And in June, when my baby came, my uncle had the marriage annulled.”
Mrs. Jeller shivered suddenly and clasped her hands with a sudden movement that shook her limp breasts under the cotton shift. “I can’t seem to get warm, even on hot days,” she said. “I can’t even sleep with regular sheets now,” she
