refrain: “Negro people! Remember your dignity.” Miss Sparks’s gentle reminder could break up a fistfight between boys or a squabble between girls. Once, when a silver bracelet had gone missing, a word from Miss Sparks had inspired the thief to return it, newly polished and wrapped in a sheet of tissue.
Mama told her mother everything Miss Sparks had said about her condition, but she didn’t share the home ec teacher’s parting words: “What a waste.” This is what Mama was thinking of while Mattie dressed her; this was the memory that froze her in her place, aggravating Mattie so bad that she slapped my Mama’s mouth for having the nerve to cry.
THE MORNING AFTER Miss Sparks told her she was wasted, and the day before her Easter dress turned into a wedding gown, Mama got up at 7
a.m. and ironed herself a blue blouse with a Peter Pan col ar. She was boiling a pan of water for her bath when Mattie stumbled into the kitchen, sleepy-eyed and hungover.
“What you doing, Laverne?”
“Getting ready for school.”
Mattie held my mama’s arm. “They didn’t tel you? You can’t go to school no more.”
“Oh,” Mama said. “Oh,” she said again, hanging the white-col ared blouse in her closet and turning down the fire under the pan of bathwater.
Mama let her Murphy bed out, dressed it with heavy blankets despite the heat, and lay down. When her mother left to pick up the white people’s laundry, Mama opened her eyes. “What a waste.” She said it over and over.
The Henry County judge wouldn’t do it, even though Mattie kept saying, “She’s pregnant!” Mama cringed each time her mother pronounced the terrible word, which an emphasis on the first syl able. “She’s
“Are you pregnant?”
Mama looked to Daddy, who wore the clothes he wore to sing in the youth choir. Fresh white shirt and blue pants ironed with too much starch.
Behind his glasses, Daddy looked, in turn, to Grandma Bunny. She was there, not in her Sunday best, but in a good dress, the same green of unripe tomatoes. Mama let her eyes fol ow Daddy’s and waited for him to look back at her, but he didn’t. After searching his mother’s face, he turned to Uncle Raleigh, who just tugged his shirtsleeves so that they would cover his bony wrists.
“Young lady,” the judge said.
“Sir,” she said quietly.
“Are you pregnant?”
“Oh,” Mama said.
Daddy spoke up. “I p-p-plan to own up to m-m-my responsibilities, sir.” He looked again at Grandma Bunny, who gave him a smal but generous smile. Mama wondered how it must feel for someone to be proud of you like that.
“Son, nobody is addressing you. Young lady . . .” he said again.
“I don’t know,” Mama said, hoping to stop him before he said that awful word again.
“You know,” Mattie said.
The judge leaned over his desk a little more. He had a reputation for being a decent white man, much better than the rest. Mattie’s cousin kept house for his family for thirty-some years and nobody ever laid a hand on her.
“You want to get married, gal? You want to be a wife to this boy?”
“I don’t know,” Mama said again, looking now into the judge’s face.
He settled back in his chair and fiddled with the tiny stone animals resting on his desk. He polished a quartz rabbit on his shirtfront before speaking. “I won’t do it. I can’t give you a license.”
Mattie said, “What do you mean you can’t? I’m her mother. There’s his mother. We give our permission.”
The judge shook his head. “The girl is not giving consent.”
“But she’s pregnant,” Mattie Lee said. “What would you do for your own child?”
“I can’t do it,” the judge said.
“We’l just go to Cobb County, then,” Mattie Lee said.
“You’l just have to.” The judge looked up at the wal clock.
“You can do it tomorrow. Today is done with.”
ON THE SECOND attempt, only Daddy dressed up. Mama wore the blouse she’d ironed on the day she found out she couldn’t go back to school.
Grandma Bunny was absent, as she couldn’t get a second day off from her job, but the white folks did lend the car, a Packard, which Daddy drove the twenty miles to Cobb County. They left early, as Marietta, Georgia, was not a good place to be colored after sundown; it was so racist that they had even lynched Jewish people.
Mattie sat up front with Daddy, with one hand on the dashboard to hold herself steady. In the backseat, Mama leaned herself against the door and Uncle Raleigh stretched his long pale arm over to touch her sleeve.
The second judge sold them the license without asking any questions of Mama or Daddy. He did look crooked at Uncle Raleigh. “You colored, son?”
“Yes, sir,” Uncle Raleigh said.
