Silver Sparrow

by Tayari Jones

MY FATHER, JAMES WITHERSPOON, is a bigamist.

Mother said she knew that something wasn’t right between a man and a woman when the gift was a blade.

When most people think of bigamy, if they think of it at all, they imagine some primitive practice taking place on the pages of National Geographic. In Atlanta, we remember one sect of the back-to-Africa movement that used to run bakeries in the West End. Some people said it was a cult, others called it a cultural movement. Whatever it was, it involved four wives for each husband. The bakeries have since closed down, but sometimes we still see the women, resplendent in white, trailing six humble paces behind their mutual husband.

Even in Baptist churches, ushers keep smelling salts on the ready for the new widow confronted at the wake by the other grieving widow and her stair-step kids. Undertakers and judges know that it happens all the time, and not just between religious fanatics, traveling salesmen, handsome sociopaths, and desperate women.

mother would be called upon to do the talking. She is gifted with language and is able to layer difficult details in such a way that the result is smooth as water. She is a magician who can make the whole world feel like a dizzy illusion. The truth is a coin she pulls from behind your ear.

Yes, we have suffered, but we never doubted that we enjoyed at least one peculiar advantage when it came to what really mattered: I knew about Chaurisse; she didn’t know about me.

was still enjoying the memory of the way she pronounced beautifully. To this day, when I hear anyone say that word, I feel loved.

She left the room, but I don’t know that she trusted him not to say something that would leave me wounded and broken-winged for life. I could see it in her face. When she was upset she moved her jaw around invisible gum. At night, I could hear her in her room, grinding her teeth in her sleep. The sound was like gravel under car wheels.

“What happens in my life, in my world, doesn’t have anything to do with you. You can’t tell your teacher that your daddy has another wife.

Atlanta ain’t nothing but a country town,

“Your other wife and your other girl is a secret?” I asked him. He put me down from his lap, so we could look each other in the face. “No. You’ve got it the wrong way a...

I closed my eyes on the short walk because I didn’t like the wallpaper in the hallway.

“No, sir.” And this was entirely the truth, but I felt different than I had just a few minutes before when I’d pulled my drawing out of its sleeve. My skin stayed the same while this difference snuck in through a pore and attached itself to whatever brittle part forms my center. You are the secret.

James ate his meal, spooning honey onto a dinner roll when my mother said there would be no dessert. He drank a big glass of Coke. “Don’t eat too much,” my mother said. “You’ll have to eat again in a little while.” “I’m always happy to eat your food, Gwen. I’m always happy to sit at your table.”

She spent half an hour each night squinting at her skin before a magnifying mirror, applying swipes of heavy creams from Mary Kay. When I asked her what she was doing, she said, “I am improving my appearance. Wives can afford to let themselves go. Concubines must be vigilant.”

“Stop it,” I said, afraid that just saying my sister’s name would unleash some terrible magic the way that saying “Bloody Mary” while staring into a pan of water would turn the liquid red and thick.

“He said I was a secret.” My mother pulled me into a close hug, crisscrossing her arms across my back and letting her hair hang around me like a magic curtain. I will never forget the smell of her hugs. “That motherfucker,” she said. “I love him, but I might have to kill him one day.”

James loves you equal to Chaurisse. If he had any sense, he’d love you best. You’re smarter, more mannerable, and you’ve got better hair. But what you have is equal love, and that is good enough.”

“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.”

a change in the rhythm that connected her heart to the rest of her body.

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.

she wasted her wishes on her mother. Flora, my grandmother, ran off when my mother was just three months old. For six days Flora wrapped her breasts in cabbage leaves to dry up the milk and then just up and left one Sunday before church with nothing but the clothes on her back and the money she got when her numbers hit.

my grandmother, the wild woman. Instead, she called me Dana Lynn, a sly wink at her own name. Gwendolyn.

She tells me that when she looks back on it, the reasons she left Clarence were not good enough reasons to leave a marriage, but she doesn’t think that she ever had a good enough reason to marry him in the first place. Mother says she married him because he was good-looking and rich—the youngest in a family of pretty undertakers—and because he had asked her to the eighth-grade dance. Five years later, she was his wife. Seven years later, she was divorced, living in a rooming house, and falling in love with a married man. Eight years later, I was born.

he’d be back. “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.”

Mother didn’t feel that James Witherspoon was trying to buy her. She thought that, for some reason, he just liked her. It was a nice idea, being liked. There was no harm in being liked by a married man. There was no harm in liking one back if all you did was like.

she felt silly for wearing her own ring—just the band, as her ex-husband had taken back the stone; it belonged to his mother, and she couldn’t expect to take it with her. And she wondered, now, why she kept on wearing it.

Willie Mae, who typed for an insurance company, would already be onboard, sitting right behind the driver, because she was from Alabama and had walked to work all that year to support Mrs. Parks.

“You can say whatever you want.” It was strangely comforting to talk to the back of his head like this. It was what she imagined talking to a priest would be like.

And this is how it started. Just with coffee and the exchange of their long stories. Love can be incremental. Predicaments, too.

James was an easygoing man, master of his emotions. “The key to life,” he told me once, “is to avoid the highs and the lows. It’s the peaks and valleys that mess you up.” He liked to behave as though his uninflected disposition was because of some philosophical leaning, but I knew it was because passion of any sort brought out the stammer and turned him into a freak. Anyone who has ever seen James when the stammer rode him could tell how much it hurt him. His face and neck seemed to swell as though the words were trapped in there, painful and deadly like sickle cells. And finally, with a jerk, spasm, or kick, the sentence would break free, unfettered and whole.

Mother never argued on her own behalf. It was “always about Dana Lynn.” My father, before he refused to accommodate her demands always, first, insisted that he loved me. There was a time in my life when that was almost enough.

James continued to fight with his throat to release the words jammed there. With a sudden kick of his right leg, barely missing my shoulder, he said, “Stay the hell away from my family.”

man is just a man, and that’s all we have to work with.”

James smelled sweet, like liquor and cola. To this day and for the rest of my life, I will always have a soft spot for a man with rum on his breath.

am not one of those people who believe that everything happens for a reason. Or, if I am, I don’t believe that everything happens for a good reason. But the first time that I encountered my sister, Chaurisse, when I wasn’t under the careful supervision of my mother, was at the Atlanta Civic Center in 1983. There’s only so much that you can chalk up to coincidence. I believe in the eventuality of things.

My mother had been right. I was a precocious child. A bitter woman at age fourteen.

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

had that sort of let-go look that beauticians have on their days off.

Everyone knows that this is the hardest thing that you can ever tell a man, even if he’s your husband, and my father was someone else’s husband. All you can do is give him the news and let him decide if he is going to leave or if he is going to stay.

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.

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?

The basement, on the other hand, was a manly space, equipped with a Ping-Pong table, wet bar, and cable TV. The atmosphere was cool and damp like earthworms and smelled vaguely of strawberry incense.

then she had the nerve to say that she was a virgin when she married my father. She said it with this little smile on her face.” I knew the little smile she was talking about. You see it on the faces of girls who were born to be somebody’s wife. That virgin-smile was plenty annoying on the faces of tenth-grade girls, but on grown women it was infuriating. One good thing about having a mother like mine is that she never went and got all superior on me.

Before Corey, I thought that my mama just didn’t like kids, but when Corey was born and I saw the way she carried on about him, I saw that it wasn’t that she didn’t like kids, she just didn’t like me.”

“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.”

Hers was a good job with benefits that included more than health, eye, and dental. Mother had daily access to doctors. As she assisted them by performing the tasks that were beneath them, she asked them about their daughters. What lessons did they take, where did they buy their clothes, and where did they plan to go to college? Every now and then, she would chat with the doctors’ wives, mining for personal information, like where they stood on issues like contraception and sex ed in schools (testing out her theory that rich people put their girls on the Pill at twelve). On her break, she took careful notes on a small pad she kept in her locker.

Although I saw my mother’s father each spring, I spoke to him only once in my life.

We were accustomed to covert endeavors, but we were different when we surveilled my grandfather. When we shadowed Chaurisse and her mother, we were nervous and excited, like rookie cops. These adventures left us stimulated and hungry, like we’d been swimming. But our yearly visits to my grandfather made us nervous and unsure.

I asked my mother if she found this all to be at least a little bit hypocritical. No, she said. She found it to be ironic.