I watched her taillights go, wishing I could’ve gone with her, for I started feeling love for that woman at that time, a real love, and it was the first time. Thing is, when somebody’s thinking about love in The Bottom, mostly nothing good comes of it. Love comes and goes, they say. But understanding? In The Bottom, understanding don’t come easy. It comes hard. And it don’t never feel good neither.
• • •
AT THE END OF SCHOOL the next day, Miss McIntyre called me aside after the bell had rung to finish the day and said, “Stay here.”
I said, “I got to walk Sissie home.”
“Dex and Seymour can walk her home.” She told them and they done it.
After everybody left, she said, “I need you to do something for me.”
She was sitting at her desk and I walked over. She reached inside a drawer and gived me a fat envelope. “Take this over to Mrs. Shays and give it to her.”
I said, “What is it?”
“It’s called none of your business.”
“Is it about Minnie Jug? He got to fight in the Army now?”
“Just give it to her. If she asks you to read it to her, read it.”
“Why me?”
“’Cause you’re the best reader in this class. And you’re a nosybody.”
“What’d I do wrong?”
“Listening to other people’s conversations is what you did wrong. Just give her this letter.”
“What is it?”
“It’s about Sylvester.”
“Who’s that?”
“Minnie Jug. Don’t give it to him. This is for his mother. Not him.”
“She’s Goat’s ma, too. Can’t Goat give it to her?”
Miss McIntyre, for the first time ever, looked a little confused. “It’s a favor to Goat too, okay?”
“Why I got to do Goat’s business, Miss McIntyre?”
She looked at me stern. “’Cause you’re so concerned about everybody’s business.”
“I didn’t mean nothing that day you was at Goat’s.”
“Then why’d you sit there three hours listening to me and Mrs. Shays?”
“I just . . .”
I didn’t know what to say. I wanted to say, “I sat there ’cause I loves you, Miss McIntyre. And I want you to take me out of The Bottom and make me your son. And then later on I can be your husband and live downtown in the city where the lights are bright. And we can drive your nice red car. And when I go to sleep at night I can wake up and see you first thing in the morning, the way I see you in my dreams at night, looking so pretty with your glasses off.” But all them thoughts made me scared. Me and her alone in the room after school suddenly didn’t seem like so much fun. She was staring at me, setting close to me at her desk, all bothered and serious, and I could smell her perfume and see her makeup and all, and them big brown eyes behind them pretty glasses was looking on, and that cute little button nose and all the rest of her right there, and I could see she was bothered about something inside, and that got me plain scared of the whole deal.
“I would take it myself,” she said, “but . . . I’m in too deep now as it is.”
“You done something wrong?” I asked.
“Course not!” she said. She thought a moment, then said: “Tell you what. Take it to her job at the hospital. Tell her it’s from me. Tell her she needs to find someone who’s not in her family to read it to her. Can you do that?”
“Yes.”
“And can you promise me not to breathe a word of this to anyone? Though I know that’s probably not gonna work.” She sighed.
She seemed to be saying that last part to herself more than me. She looked so sad and pretty then, it was all I could do not to leap up and declare: “It’s all right, Miss McIntyre, I can protect you. I won’t tell a soul, I swear. It’s me and you against the whole world now, no matter what, and I will do anything including jump out this window into the ocean before I tell a soul.” But I didn’t do nothing but nod and say, “Okay.”
“That’s good,” she said. “And for your trouble—and for keeping it a secret—I’ll give you two whole dollars.”
She leaned over at her desk and opened a drawer to give me them double dollars, which gived me a chance to peek at some other doubles, them two brown bunnies paired up beneath her blouse, knocking about as she fumbled for her purse, that same pretty purse that sat in the seat of her car as she drove past The Triangle that day just before last summer. I ain’t worth two cents, is what I thought to myself, for this is the very thing they be hollering about in church. I had a fit with myself, standing there watching her knockers. But she wasn’t paying me no mind. She had opened the purse and pulled out her wallet and was fumbling around through it, and that’s the last I seen of her that day, for by the time she had flipped through the tiny papers and books and matches and little papers and got to the crumpled dollar bills in that wallet and was holding them up in her hand, I was out the door. I had snatched the thick letter envelope off the desk and was gone.
• • •
MY GRANDMA DIED at the old Carver Hospital, so I know it pretty good. I know the cafeteria exactly where Mrs. Shays worked, ’cause me and my sister Sissie was in there a bunch of times with my ma while she sat at a table sobbing and carrying on during my grandma’s last days. Mrs. Shays was nice to my ma then. She brung her coffee and said nice things and sat down and prayed for my ma and my grandma and all. My ma likes Mrs. Shays.
I found Mrs. Shays where she always is, serving food behind the counter at the buffet line where people bring their trays to get food. I got in line, and when I reached her she nodded hello and I stuck my face over the counter and whispered in a low voice, “I got to talk to you a minute, Mrs. Shays. About Miss McIntyre.”
She said, “Wait a minute till I get a break,” and gived me a piece of cake. I sat in the cafeteria and waited till she was clear.
She came over to the table and sat down and looked at me a long minute. Finally she said, “Do I need to talk to your ma about you being a busybody and poking your nose in other people’s business?”
“No, Mrs. Shays,” I said. “And I’m sorry. I just wanted to see Miss McIntyre.”
“Don’t you see her enough?”
“Yes, ma’am, I seen her today in school. She said to give you this.”
I handed her the letter.
She took the envelope and opened it up and pulled out the pages. She held the pages upside down first, then turned them the right way, then glanced around the room to make sure no one was watching. Finally she said, “You know this don’t mean nothing to me, Butter.”
“Miss McIntyre said to tell you ‘Get somebody to read this who ain’t no relation to you.’”
“What’s it about?”
“She said it’s about Goat and Minnie Jug.”
“You sure?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
She glanced around the room. “Okay,” she said. “I’ll give you a dollar to read it to me. I get paid Thursday. That’s in two days.”
“Mrs. Shays, I thank you for it, but I don’t want your money. I already stuck my nose too far into you and Miss McIntyre’s business now. If my mother finds out, she’ll whip on me so bad no amount of dollars is gonna help me. I won’t do it no more. I learned my lesson. I swear to God.”
She smiled a little bit. “Most of us has a desire to mind other folks’ business,” she said. “That’s the child in you, Butter, not the man. But every child has to learn grown-up things in some form or fashion. So I guess this is your time, for I needs to know what’s in here. I got ten minutes before I got to get back to work. Can you read all these pages in ten minutes?”
She handed me the pages. I looked ’em over.
“I think so,” I said.
“G’wan, then.”
So I did.
The fi
rst was a letter Miss McIntyre had wrote to the Army saying that, according to the law, if the Army wants to draft a boy who is the oldest boy in the house and his ma is a widow and that boy is the breadwinner and caretaker and all helping his ma, then rule 7a, clause B or whatever, that boy couldn’t be drafted no kind of way, ’cause he got to help his ma who’s a widow. She had wrote the letter and signed it as Mrs. Shays, and the Army wrote back to her and said “we agree” and would review it and so on and so forth, but it looked like Minnie Jug was in the clear.
“So my boy Minnie Jug is safe then,” Mrs. Shays said.
I didn’t say nothing, for that letter from the Army had said, “If the ma is a widow.” Mrs. Shays wasn’t no widow. Popcorn was her husband. But I already seen she was a lot smarter than me even if she couldn’t read a lick, so I didn’t say nothing.
Then she buried her face in her hands silently, choked a little bit, clearing her throat, then pulled her face back up high, looked into the palm of her hands, and said, “Now read the other.”
I opened the second letter.
“It’s birth certificates,” I said. “Four altogether.”
“Read all the names,” she said.
So I read ’em. The first was Goat’s. It said Seymour Shays. Daddy named Irving Evans. Ma was Ruth Shays.
The second was Minnie Jug’s birth certificate. Same daddy and momma. Irving Evans, daddy. Ruth Shays, momma.
The third was Tory. Same thing.
And then there was a fourth: Irving Evans.
I said, “This last one—” then cut myself short, for I seen somthing was wrong.
I read it close, then checked the dates. It wasn’t no mistake. They was all brothers: Minnie Jug, Tory, Goat—and Irving Evans, the oldest—all born a couple of years apart. On Irving Evans’s birth certificate, the father wasn’t no Shays. It said “colored.” The space for “mother” was marked “Ruth Shays.”
All brothers. Or half brothers. Or something like that.
And Goat had told me that his daddy Mr. Popcorn’s real name was Irving Evans.
Mrs. Shays was looking at me as I looked at the papers. “Does it look proper?” she said.
“Yes, ma’am, it looks proper,” I said.
“Good.”
I gived her back the paper and went home. Maybe it was a mistake, I thought. Maybe Irving Evans was a little Irving Evans and his real daddy was a big Irving Evans someplace else.
Or maybe the white folks put Mrs. Shays’s name on that birth certificate because one colored looks like another in Kentucky.
Maybe Irving Evans wasn’t Mr. Popcorn. Maybe Irving Evans died someplace and nobody brung him up on account of how he died.
Later on, I thought to do the math and figure out who was who. But then I figured that’s probably what Miss McIntyre already done, which is why she didn’t want to see Mrs. Shays herself.
I thought about that all the way home, about how Goat spent every morning for the past ten years running behind Mr. Popcorn while Mr. Popcorn rode his bike to work, running next to his brother who was also his father and his brother at the same time. And maybe that’s what made Goat run so fast.
FATHER ABE
Here they come!”
Eighteen little colored children, tiny tufts of life, peeked their faces out the doorway of a ruined arms factory and made their way into the sunshine of a glorious Richmond, Va., afternoon. As they emerged in line, holding hands, forty-three Negro soldiers, members of the 32nd Pennsylvania Colored Infantry Regiment, dressed in tattered Union Blue, stopped and leaned on their shovels to watch. They’d spent this morning as they did yesterday morning, and the one before that and the one before that, digging a trench around the ruins of the Tredegar Gun and Ammunition Factory, which they had helped destroy the month before, along with most of Richmond, the capital of the Confederacy. Several weeks had passed since they’d taken this town. The war was nearly over but not quite. No one was quite sure. Nobody told them anything. There were still things to do, but where to do them, and how to do them, and when to do them, they had no idea. Their orders were to dig, and when they stopped, to dig, and dig again.
And dig they did. For nine days the soldiers dug, with only one distraction. Each day around noon, the men, thirsty and hot, exhausted from digging, would stop to lean on their shovels and admire the day’s one form of entertainment, a daily ritual: Each day eighteen orphaned Negro children, aged five to thirteen years, emerged in the gorgeous Virginia afternoon sun from the ruins of the factory and paraded past, marching out in double file to follow their caretaker, Sister Coles, on a daily trek to the Freedman’s Bureau about four miles up the road, for a meal of hard tack and biscuits.
The soldiers enjoyed watching the kids. Each day they gathered in small groups to swab their faces with handkerchiefs and guess the origins of each Negro child as the orphans marched by.
“That big one there, he’s a Georgia Negro,” a brigade cannoneer remarked. “See that wide head? That’s how they look.”
“Naw,” another soldier offered, “that’s a Sea Island boy. See them wide feet? Them’s fishermen’s feet, I’d reckon. South Carolina. Low Country.”
“He ain’t Low Country,” the cannoneer snorted. “He’s from Maryland. That boy’s daddy is a waterman. That’s where his feet come from. Watermen got the biggest feet.”
A portly rifleman stepped between the two and said gaily, “I wouldn’t bet a smooth dollar on none of y’all guesses,” he said. “But that one there,” he pointed. “I know who his daddy is.” He called out. “Hey Abe Lincoln! Hey boy!”
At the end of the line the last child, a tiny, mixed-race boy, looked up. Abraham Henry Lincoln, aged five, his soft skin the color of creamed coffee, the sun bouncing off his curly hair and light eyes, gaped in awe at the muscled, tall, smiling men leaning on their shovels. He waved and smiled shyly, showing several missing front teeth, prompting a burst of laughter and woofing.
“Boy, when you gonna grow some teeth!”
“Son, them gums is ripe enough for butter beans!”
“Keep your mouth closed, boy, less’n flies get in there!”
“Hey Abe,” the cannoneer called out. “Want an apple?”
Little Abe Lincoln stopped short, dropping the hand of the kid in front of him, lingering, as the rest of the kids marched ahead in twos. He stood shyly for a moment, then slowly crossed the road as the line of kids drew away.
“Where you from, boy?” the cannoneer asked. “We got a bet going.”
“Where’s my apple?” he asked.
“Lemme see now,” the cannoneer said, searching his pockets. “I just had it . . .”
Little Abe Lincoln watched anxiously as the cannoneer, bereft of apples and any other food, searched his pockets.
“Aw, leave ’em be, Pete,” the sergeant said. His name was Big Nate, a tall, serious man from Alabama. He patted Little Abe Lincoln on the head. “G’wan, boy. Catch up to the rest, before Sister Coles comes back and puts a cat’s tail on ya. I’ll might fetch you a real apple tomorrow.”
“Where you gonna get it from?” the cannoneer sneered.
Nate ignored him and nodded at Abe. “G’wan ahead, boy.”
Little Abe turned to hustle to catch up with the line of children, which had nearly reached the corner of the battle-torn street of ravaged homes and storefronts. The child had nearly caught up to the others when suddenly the cannoneer shouted out, “By the way, your daddy’s coming tomorrow!”
Abe stopped short as the line of children moved away, turned the corner, and disappeared out of sight. He trotted back.
“You know my daddy?” Little Abe said. He stared up at the cannoneer, a portly soldier named Vernon, who seemed as tall as a tree and as wide as a house.
“Course I do! It’s Father Abe hisself,” he said, with a wink at the others.
Little Ab
e Lincoln stood alone now. The line of kids had vanished.
“How you know he’s my pa?” he asked.
“He got the same name, don’t he?” the cannoneer said. “He’s Abe Lincoln. You Abe Lincoln. Put two and two together, boy. He’s a big man, y’know, your pa.”
“You know him?”
“Why, everybody knows Abe Lincoln, son! He’s the biggest white man in the world. He lives in the biggest white house you ever seen. Got land yonder far as your eyes can see. Got more money than the King of France. And he’s coming tomorrow! Right here to Richmond!”
“He is?”
“Surely! Heard that from a mule skinn—”
“That’s enough, Vernon,” the sergeant, Big Nate, said.
The cannoneer glanced at his fellow soldiers, whose smiles had disappeared.
“I’m just funning him, Nate,” he said.
Nate turned toward Little Abe and knelt down. Abe saw the big man’s gentle eyes focus on him.
“Now, son—” and suddenly Little Abe felt himself being snatched in the air and the world was upside down. He found himself seeing the sergeant sideways. Sister Coles had grasped him and snatched him in the air. Her strong arm held him on her hip like a sack of meal. She glared at Big Nate.
“How’d you like that soup I made for y’all last week, Mr. Nate?” she asked.
“I liked it fine, Sister Coles,” Big Nate said.
“Good. Because I peed in it.”
The soldiers laughed as Sister Coles turned away, holding Abe Lincoln under her hip like a pig suckling, moving down the road fast, as if her speed would ease the great pain that she knew had ached Little Abe all five years of his life, from the moment he could recognize himself. That he was named after a man he never saw, a father that never was nor ever would be. And that at age five, he still had no idea who Abraham Lincoln was.
• • •
THAT NIGHT, A LONE OWL stood guard atop the peak of the shelled-out roof of the destroyed north wing of the abandoned Tregador Gun Factory. Beneath a twilight sky and shattered rooftop, Sister Coles’s orphans lay on makeshift straw mattresses serving as beds, underneath tables that once held lathes, tools, and machine presses and now served as roofs during the rain, inside a factory workshop that had once powered a mighty nation to war against itself. Their hissing, chattering voices lifted into the night air, through the gaping roof and up into the night as they discussed matters of life, their whispers carried aloft by the wind into the sky, where every dream seemed possible and the echoes of past pain and lost parents vanished into the promise of tomorrow’s coming.