Silver Sparrow

by Tayari Jones

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

“Girl,” Willie Mae said, “I am not telling you how to live your life, but you must be one high-minded lady to leave a perfectly good man just for chasing a little tail.”

“The key to life,” he told me once, “is to avoid the highs and the lows.

He said his wife, Laverne, made him stand on the porch with his cigarettes, even when it rained.

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.

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

On the radio, Smokey Robinson complained that “a taste of honey is worse than none at all.”

James returned to his two-story house with a heavy heart, to be sure. My father is not a monster, but he still had a home to go to and a woman there to fix his plate for dinner.

Tenderhearted, to be honest. For one quick moment, lying there in the bed in her wool crepe suit and panty hose, she looked at Raleigh and wished that she had met him first instead of James.

He was just born at the wrong time, which is something that could happen to anyone.

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?

Next week, my stepmother is taking her nieces to see The Wiz. She asked me yesterday if I wanted to come along. I said yes at first, and then she told me that she was going to have to buy an extra ticket and I might end up sitting by myself in the balcony or something. So I told her I didn’t want to go, that I don’t like plays. But really I have never seen one before.”

This was what it was to have a friend, someone who knew exactly who you were and didn’t blame you for it.

“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.”

I didn’t like it when she used this phrase, sounding like a child, bragging about what she had done with her babysitting pay. She meant that this gift had come from her, without any contribution from my father. She’d paid for it with the labor of swollen legs and stiff fingers. I didn’t use the computer, but I did appreciate the gift, the thought of it.

Then Raleigh would blush as red as my mother’s shiny toenails and I wondered what it felt like to live inside such disloyal skin.

My father loved me. He said it, right here, not to please my mother, but just because he wanted it to be said.

I needed to learn how to trust people.

My mother says that if a man hits you once, leave. But the truth is this—my father smacked my mother across the jaw when I was six months old. She stumbled out of the room, and he sat in front of my crib and cried. She says that was the first and only time. So it happens. But you can’t go around saying that.

Save me, James. I dare you.

said, “You gotta decide whether half a nigger is better than no nigger at all.” “Don’t call him that.”

This was why I preferred smoking to drinking. Liquor made me emotional while weed put a little daylight between me and my problems. It wasn’t that I forgot my troubles, it’s just that they didn’t trouble me quite so much.

He squandered his chance to be the protective father. You can’t come rushing to the rescue six months later. I wasn’t a person to be saved only when it was a convenient time to swoop in.

“I said he’s not hitting me.” “Dana, I am your mother. You can’t lie to me.”

Maybe I shared all my mother’s fantasies. Her cravings were so straightforward, honest, and universal. Who doesn’t want to be loved? Anyone who has been cast off knows the pain of it.

This secret was mine, wrapped like a shiny present, lodged on a high shelf where Mother could see it but couldn’t reach.

“Yes it does,” she said. “Love is a maze. Once you get in it, you’re pretty much trapped. Maybe you manage to claw your way out, but then what have you accomplished?”

Raleigh knows now that Miss Bunny could not have possibly loved him. He was a small stranger, piss-soaked and desperate. What Miss Bunny needed was a companion for James, whom she did love. She needed someone to sleep in the house with him while she cared for the white children at her job. Miss Bunny was a kind woman, and generous. When she told Raleigh she loved him, it was like the music of laughter. He knew from the battered books at school what to say in return. “I love you, too.”

“Miss Bunny loves you,” Raleigh says. “She doesn’t know it yet, but she does.”

You wanted me to meet my granddaughter. How am I supposed to get to know her with you two breathing down my neck?”

“If I could get out of bed, I would hug your neck,” she said. “I never turned anybody away from my door. Your daddy knows that. I took in Raleigh, and later Laverne. I have never turned anybody away. Never sent nobody back.” She shut up and worked on her breathing some more. “I love you,” she said to me, just as she had said to Raleigh so many years ago. 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.

My grandmother took my living hand in her dying one. “I never had no quarrel with the truth. I hope somebody says something like that at my wake.”

Whatever you want to say about her when you get grown, you can never say that she betrayed you.”

was not the first time that I had seen my mother cry, but the experience troubled me in the pit of myself. “I ask for so little,” she said. “I know, Mother.”

She knew that sometimes women died while having babies, and she thought that if she were lucky, this is what would happen to her.

outcast. I got invited to slumber parties and I went, as eager as anyone, but I was no one’s best friend, and the best friend is the only friend that matters.

but I wasn’t exactly a virtuoso and who can take comfort in doing something that you’re bad at? That left only the mall.

“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.”

Silver girls liked to be friends with each other, keeping all their shine, which, in my opinion, was a little bit selfish.

I also made a big deal out of sending in an application to FAMU in Tallahassee.

I’d learned from boys. Talk familiar and you’ll get familiar. This was different from what I felt even for Jamal.

And she might have a good home. She could just be lonely. It’s a lot of people walking around that’s lonely.”

It’s funny how you think you can know a person.

That’s what happened when you want something too much. Life, it seemed, was a long con, rotten with dirty tricks.

Be careful what you wish for

There was no way to know for sure who had heard what, so all you could do was live your life like no one knew anything while being scared that everyone knew everything.

Relatable

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.

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.

“Mama!” I said, no longer using that careful voice you use when talking to babies and alcoholics. “Gwen might not be the only crazy person in the equation. Daddy was with her for almost twenty years. Dana is their kid. Don’t you think he should, I don’t know, suffer?” It wasn’t the right word, it sounded too biblical, but it was all I could come up with.

“Mama,” I said. “You can’t put the rain back in the sky.”

Uncle Raleigh reminded me a lot of Jamal, the way those nice guys break your heart but manage to make you feel like they’re the ones who have been done wrong.