Silver Sparrow

by Tayari Jones

Undertakers and judges know that it happens all the time, and not just between religious fanatics, traveling salesmen, handsome sociopaths, and desperate women.

Laverne is his wife. She found him first and my mother has always respected the other woman’s squatter’s rights.

My mother would curse at hearing me use that word, legitimate, but if she could hear the other word that formed in my head, she would close herself in her bedroom and cry. In my mind, Chaurisse is his real daughter.

With wives, it only matters who gets there first. With daughters, the situation is a bit more complicated.

Life, you see, is all about knowing things. That is why my mother and I shouldn’t be pitied.

Atlanta ain’t nothing but a country town, and everyone knows everybody.”

“Am I a secret?” I asked my mother. “No,” she said. “You are an unknown. That little girl there doesn’t even know she has a sister. You know everything.” “God knows everything,” I said. “He’s got the whole world in his hands.” “That’s true,” my mother said. “And so do we.”

What she had with my father was a sort of creeping love, the kind that sinks in before you know it and makes a family of you. She says that love like what she has with my father occurs on the God level, not of the world and not bound by the laws of the state of Georgia.

James approached the counter on an afternoon on which she was feeling particularly remorseful, not so much for throwing away her marriage but for having gotten married in the first place.

Everyone else, she knew, would say that the key to her looks was her head of hair, long and thick, that reached past her shoulder blades. It was the only useful thing her mother left her.

Mother knew what the white lady was talking about, but she couldn’t laugh at a black man with her, even though she was only laughing at him for being a man.

“Some men,” said Willie Mae, “would be back if all they bought you was a Peppermint Pattie. Money is for buying company, and they know it.”

And this is how it started. Just with coffee and the exchange of their long stories. Love can be incremental. Predicaments, too. Coffee can start a life just as it can start a day. This was the meeting of two people who were destined to love from before they were born, from before they made choices that would complicate their lives. This love just rolled toward my mother as though she were standing at the bottom of a steep hill. Mother had no hand in this, only heart.

When you have to wear dress blues and a hat and you work for white people, you’re wearing a costume. You’re no better than the monkey decked out in a red jacket

But I lived in a world where you could never want what you wanted out in the open.

It’s funny how three or four notes of anger can be struck at once, creating the perfect chord of fury.

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.

The connection between the men was like a living thing, like a fifth person in the room.

I slipped easily into my role as unacknowledged girlfriend. When you already had one secret life, what bother was it to have another secret within that secret?

“If you have a brother, it’s the worst thing. If your mama has a boy to care for, she will show you the kind of love she is capable of. And once you see that, you will never get over it. You will be lonely for the rest of your life.”

Isn’t love when you defend someone when you know she’s wrong? I didn’t want her to stand up for what was right, I wanted my mother to stand up for me.

I have thought back on this moment, as I have on many such moments of my life, and wondered why it is that I have been so careful with other people’s secrets.

I know that it was supposed to make me feel warm and welcome, but instead I wondered if she saw me the way she saw Raleigh—as an unfortunate bastard, unloved and pissy.

I used to love her desperate love for me, her weighty kisses. Hers was an electric affection burning away everything it touched, leaving me only with the clean lines of a lightning rod.

Besides, my father loved me best when I was his baby girl, his Buttercup. Fathers are that way. All they want is that you be clean, entertaining, and adoring.

“Silver” is what I called girls who were natural beauties but who also smoothed on a layer of pretty from a jar. It wasn’t just how they looked, it was how they were. The name came from a song my mother sang sometimes when she was getting dressed to go out somewhere special. She sang along with Arethra Franklin at the end: “Sail on, silver girl . . . Your time has come to shine. All your dreams are on their way.”

When I explained why I wasn’t interested in having friends, I complained that “girls are too messy,” but it was a lie. The messiness was what I craved. I wanted to tell someone everything I knew. I wanted to name names and tell the whole story.

It was perfect enough to make you believe that God really keeps his eyes on sparrows and overweight colored women alike.

am not the one to believe that our shared blood made us sisters, but having shared a father gave us something in common that looped around our ankles and pulled tight around our wrists. This was between all of us. The six of us were hog-tied, fastened in place by different knots.

When you have seen your mother shattered, there’s no putting her back together. There will always be seams, chipped edges, and clumps of dried glue. Even if you could get her to where she looks the same, she will never be stronger than a cracked plate.

I thought the whole point of growing up was that you got to be somebody’s wife, that you weren’t caught up in some man’s crazy games. And here I was, this only child, told all my life that I was a miracle. I may have been my mother’s miracle, but I was my father’s other daughter. His not-silver girl. My mother wasn’t the only person in this house who had been cheated on.

PEOPLE SAY, THAT WHICH doesn’t kill you makes you stronger. But they are wrong. What doesn’t kill you, doesn’t kill you. That’s all you get. Sometimes, you just have to hope that’s enough.