My mother and I both had our eyes fixed on the old woman as if we were hypnotized. “What happened to your baby?” I asked, almost involuntarily.
Mrs. Jeller looked off toward Mrs. Bryant, the social worker, who was still watching the silent television. “For a year and a half, my baby lived,” she said. “It was a baby girl. I left school and went out to work for white folks, and my lady, Miz Guthrie, was crazy about my baby. ‘Little Daisy,’ she named her, and kept her in a big basket in the dining room. She called me every hour to nurse the baby. That child saw more white society than I ever did. But she sickened and died; a lot of children died in those days. Two years later I was fourteen and free of husband and daughter. Free of both of them, and still a child myself.”
The old woman suddenly turned her head back toward Mama and me, and gave us a toothless smile so wide and so swift that it seemed demonic. We both rose abruptly from our chairs as if we’d been struck from behind. Once on my feet, I really felt as if I might faint from the stifling heat of the room and the smell of liniment.
“It’s been very nice to see you,” said my mother, after making a bit of small talk.
“Nicer for me than for you,” said Mrs. Jeller, with a wink.
When we stood waiting for the elevator in the red linoleum hallway of the nursing home, I felt unwilling to look my mother in the face, and she seemed disinclined to look at me. We stood awkwardly, half facing away from each other, and I felt very aware of my body under my clothes. For the first time, I was sensing the complicated possibilities of my own flesh—possibilities of corruption, confused pleasure, even death. The tale we’d heard—that had burst so unexpectedly upon a dullish Saturday afternoon—had a disturbing archaic flavor; it seemed, even, in a vague way, obscene. In its light it was hard for us to face each other as mother and child. We had not yet arrived at an acquaintance with each other as two women, and so we had to remain silent.
“I never heard that story before,” said Mama finally, taking a handkerchief from her purse and patting the sides of her neck. “Poor old thing, she’s gotten very senile.”
“It was awfully hot in there,” I said, gathering up my hair in my hands and flapping it to make a breeze.
“Old people like hot rooms. Their limbs don’t seem to hold any warmth.”
We got in the car and began the long drive back to the suburbs, and after a minute or two it was possible to talk naturally. We never, however, resumed our formulaic argument over the French jeans: one visible effect of our visit to old Mrs. Jeller was that ever afterward I was allowed to pick out my own clothes. My mother explained it by saying that she guessed I was old enough to make any mistake I chose.
Negatives
I hadn’t exactly grown up with Curry Daniels, but almost—he was even kind of related. Our mothers were distant cousins and had been best friends at Philadelphia Girls’ High School; side by side, wearing floppy, Depression-style hats, they had trilled sedately through endless Sunday afternoons in the Young Women’s Choir of the New African Baptist Church. Throughout my childhood my mother received a couple of Daniels family snapshots every few months, sent in letters from Atlanta, where Curry’s family had moved after the Second World War, and where his father had become a county supervisor. From the photographs, and from two visits to Atlanta, I knew that Curry (whose real name was John Curbin) lived in the same kind of surroundings I did in Philadelphia: a comfortable, insular, middle-class black neighborhood swathed in billiard-green lawns.
Once, when I was very small, Curry and his two younger brothers visited Philadelphia, and the band of little boys—they had gathered in Matthew—harried me cruelly, unbraiding my plaits and threatening me with homemade blowpipes and twigs they said were baby rattlers. Much later, when I was in ninth grade, a snapshot of a rangy adolescent Curry (he was two years older than I was) with his legs negligently sprawled in the back seat of a Mustang convertible kept me awake and restless through a few starry May nights. After a while, though, I thought about him only when I had to send Christmas thank-you notes to his family.
When I left home in the early 1970s to go to Harvard, Mama gave me Curry’s number at Winthrop House and instructed me to call him, but of course I didn’t. I’d almost forgotten he was at the same school until I saw him one cold December morning in a lecture on King Lear. After class I ran down the steep steps of the lecture hall and caught Curry as he was stepping out onto Cambridge Street. It was snowing, and he was wearing a big down jacket; when I gave him a sudden timid squeeze, the puffs of down collapsed softly, as if he were melting away in my embrace. “Sarah! You’ve certainly turned into a fascinating stranger!” he said, staring at me and grinning, and I felt a happy little flutter in my throat.
I thought he looked pretty much the same as always—a bit like me, in fact, with his lean face that showed an almost evenly balanced mixture of black, white, and Indian blood. Below a mass of dark curls that he had tried, vainly, to shape into an Afro, his forehead was very high and bulgy, giving him a whiz-kid look of precocious intelligence, and his
