How her Audrey had stayed with that no-good Lazelle had always been a puzzle. Love? Love went out the window when you had babies and no milk. She had never liked him anyway. Her Charles Henry hadn’t either. City slicker. They had wasted their money sending her to Hampton Institute.

     His mama and papa had wasted theirs, too. Stuck up city people. Never had nothing noway. Found out all they ever did was rent, never owned anything. Gov’ment workers. Went to the store everyday. Heads stuck up. Tried to be high society coloured folk. Borrowed to send their son to college. Their son’s smarts was in his pants. Their Audrey was sponsored. For her grades. She was the smart one. She was going to be a teacher.
Mary Ellen had been downright sullen and ornery and had sassed her at times but she had taken a stick to her behind and sent her screaming. All she ever talked about was her friend Susie and killing that ole Hammerhead one day. Said she was going to run away. Lord, that would kill me. Something tore at MaMary’s heart every time she thought about that. Said she knew he was in New York. New York! thought MaMary. My child could go up there to that awful city, worse than Washington, D.C. and get swallowed up and she’d never see her again! Poor, poor child.

     Hmmprh! Surprised that gal, too, MaMary thought, when I yanked her by her hair. Strap did her good. You took a switch to a youngun, but she was a big girl and you took a strap to a girl who thought she was a woman. She had used it on her boys, never on Audrey. But this one thought she could take over and talk back to her and she was never going to allow that. She knew she was still strong for her seventy years and she had no intention of letting her granddaughter go the way of little Lazelle or her mama and papa. I’ll beat her every day if I have to, she thought.

     A light breeze came in from the river with the tide, evening shadows started to sneak and dart into the front yard, playing first with the oyster shell covered driveway, then with the big oak tree and then the front porch. It was always her favorite time of day, hers and Charles Henry’s. MaMary put her sewing down. Tears welled up and blinded her, and the memories of their life together closed in on her as it did at this time of day; Charles Henry putting his hand softly on her thigh when he wanted to make love; the plumpest of the very first oysters he’d harvested just for her; leaning on his garden hoe and looking at her while she worked beside him, throwing back his head and shouting up to the sky, “Ain’ I the luckies’ man in the world?” She stifled a scream of loneliness but because since Mary Ellen was there, she did not want the child to see her cry.

     Her thoughts went back to the time when she and Charles Henry had argued violently about all the boys going in the river with him. “Honey, they need schoolin’.” He had taken it as an insult against his own lack of it and he had hardly spoken to her for weeks. She tried to soften things up, tried to reason with him. She had lost that battle when three sons went in the river with their father. When it came to their only daughter he did not interfere. She herself had learned to read and write at the knee of her mother’s benefactor, a lady from Portsmouth, and so she was able to keep the books for her husband and sons for their oystering business.
Well, I guess Audrey loved Lazelle like she loved Charles Henry. But Lazelle hadn’t done right by Audrey. Mama’s boy, Lazelle was. His Mama hadn’t liked Audrey either. 

     Lord, Lord, MaMary thought, how she had loved that man and he had loved her. Knew he hadn’t looked at another woman just as she had never looked at another man. Hard, though, how a place and time can change things. Charles Henry had been a waterman, like his pa, and her pa, and so she knew what you had to do without. All she ever knew, she and Charles Henry, was hard work. She had borne twelve children, nine boys and three girls, five sons and one girl Audrey, had lived. 

     The city, though, had awful things, people hanging out in alleys, shooting crap, garbage and toilets running over, rats bigger than cats, streets where people were stumbling over each other, babies having babies, Lord, what the world was coming to up there, people being mean to each other, sickness, no work, bad houses, (MaMary could never ever bring herself to say whorehouses), families living in those dirty old shacks that were owned by Jews and whites. They reminded her of the oyster shacks down at the shore. Poor people lived in them too, but her family and Charles Henry’s were not like them. They worked hard, she at home, and Charles Henry and the boys had worked in the river and they had farmed, scrimped and saved and always had plenty on the table, clothes on their backs and shoes on their feet.

     She had been born Mary Carter Elizabeth Williams at Landsdowne Plantation in Robbins Neck, daughter of slaves, and Charles Henry, a son of slaves, had been born at Warner Hall, also in Robbins Neck. She held her head up high like she was carrying a banner when she thought of it.

     They had been children of proud slaves and she wanted her granddaughter to never forget where she had come from.

     Her boys and their families had long gone from the country to cities like Philly and Detroit and Trenton and made their own living and this house was to go to Audrey. Now, MaMary thought, tears stinging again, it would go to that gal there, but only if she deserved it.

     She raised herself up, put her sewing in the chair, brushed her dress straight and looked west at the setting sun. She opened the screen door and stepped down off the porch and tried not to drag that bad leg that she knew she’d had a stroke in and had tried to hide and walked around the side yard to the chicken coop. The chickens began clucking and following her as soon as she picked up their feed pan. “Time to go to bed,” she told them. 

© 2001 Elizabeth Allen Stokes All rights reserved