to have up her sleeve. But when Mother popped the question, she wasn’t angling. She was just thinking about love and about me.
He sat, staring at her from the neck down, and he tried to say something. The stammer was real y bad back then. He bucked around like he was having a seizure or something and then he said, “For once in my life, I want to marry a woman who isn’t already pregnant.”
My mother laughed at him. She couldn’t help herself. After al they had shared, he wanted to get al prissy, like he didn’t get to be a June bride.
She said, “Wel , you need to stop lying down with women you are not married to.”
The entire conversation took place on the screened-in porch of the rooming house. She should have taken him somewhere more private, but where did she have to go?
When he walked away, al the other girls watched from the windows. She could see them lifting corners of the shades and looking out.
Mother says it was like a slap in the face, but I don’t correct her. Abandonment doesn’t have the sharp but dissipating sting of a slap. It’s like a punch to the gut, bruising your skin and driving the precious air from your body.
After my father drove away, Wil ie Mae walked out onto the porch and sat beside Mother on the swing. Mother knew then how disadvantaged her situation was, pregnant and by herself. And she knew how unequal life was that she was the one who got caught. James returned to his two-story house with a heavy heart, to be sure. My father is not a monster, but he stil had a home to go to and a woman there to fix his plate for dinner.
MY MOTHER’S FORMER mother-in-law had given her a box of writing paper as a wedding gift. The stationery was lush rag cotton and engraved with my mother’s new monogram. The gift was two-handed; my mother understood immediately the spirit of it. The monogram was a genuine welcome — my mother was now a Yarboro. (When she left the marriage, she returned the fifty-year-old diamond but not her married name.) The second message of the gifted paper, clean in its cardboard box, was that she was now a woman of some stature, and such women wrote thank-you notes. Mother had already known this, as she had done wel in home economics, where she had also learned how to determine, while at dinner, the worth of a set of china.
She had written letters of gratitude for the wedding gifts — lush linens, silver-plated spoons, and cast-iron skil ets that had taken the duration of her marriage to season. But she didn’t use the Crane stationery; instead, she rebel ed with floral patterned sheets purchased at Woolworth’s. The monogrammed paper went with Mother, unused, to her new life on Ashby Street.
Sitting alone in her room, my mother took the box of paper down from her closet shelf.
My mother’s father, my grandfather, was only about five miles away from Ashby Street. He lived off Edgewood Avenue, under the watchful eyes of the church women who pitied him for first being abandoned by Flora and then having poured so much of his life into a daughter who could be no more decent than her mother had been.
When my mother didn’t receive a response to her letter by the first of the month, she suspected that the church women had destroyed it. Al her life, she had been uneasy with these surrogate stepmothers, dutiful and loveless. When she was about twelve, she accused them of intercepting Flora’s letters and birthday telegrams. Of course, the women denied the charges, and Mother final y understood that Flora had simply abandoned her. The church women were rigid but not cruel.
Although the letter that Mother scratched onto her wedding stationery was short enough to fit easily on a postcard, it had taken four drafts to perfect. (The papers ruined with her false starts stil rest in the box with the remaining sheets.) Dear Daddy,
I am having a baby, and I want to come home.
Love,
Gwendolyn B. Yarboro
The response came, final y, after nine days. The landlady handed it to my mother. She was a church woman herself, a deaconess at Mount Moriah. Not an unfeeling person, but she made it clear that she couldn’t have pregnant girls living in her place. Mother could stay as long as you couldn’t look at her and know what was going on. The same was true for her job.
“I hope this letter is from somebody doing right by you,” the landlady said.
My grandfather had written back on lined paper, a little sticky at the top where it had been pul ed from a notepad. He didn’t address her or sign his name:
This is not your home. Wherever you are is home.
When James final y returned, my mother was a different woman. It wasn’t just her body, inflated with me, that had changed. Her spirit was bloated and tender, too. She’d have to leave the rooming house in the next couple of weeks. Wil ie Mae had given my mother her life savings — rol ed coins and folded-over bil s. This money was hard- earned and smel ed like it. My mother’s own savings were meager, as she’d tended to spend most of her money at Davison’s, opening her pay envelope right there in the store and paying down layaways. She could imagine herself out on the street without even proper luggage in which to carry al her pretty store-bought dresses.
When James rang, Wil ie Mae showed him up the stairs. This was against the rules, but Mother was soon to be expel ed, anyway. She was lying in bed, stil wearing her clothes from work. Only her feet were undressed. If Wil ie Mae didn’t come in every night at nine and force her to put on a gown, she would have slept just like that. Al those good dresses, straining at the waist.
James came in the room, trailing behind Wil ie Mae with his hat in his hand like he was paying his respects to the dead. Lord only knew what Wil ie Mae said to him on the walk from the front door to the little room. He was looking like someone had taken him out behind the woodshed and beat him.
And then right behind him came Raleigh, dressed the same as James. This was my mother’s first time seeing Raleigh, and for a second she thought he was a white man, and she wondered what kind of trouble she had gotten herself into.
“This is Raleigh,” James said. “We were brought up together.”
When she looked at him close, she could tel he was colored. She could tel , too, that Raleigh was a good man. Kindhearted. Tenderhearted, to be honest. For one quick moment, lying there in the bed in her wool crepe suit and panty hose, she looked at Raleigh and wished that she had met him first instead of James.
