Memphis

by Tara M. Stringfellow

For years in this country there was no one for black men to vent their rage on except black women. And for years black women accepted that rage—even regarded that acceptance as their unpleasant duty. But in doing so, they frequently kicked back, and they seem never to have become the “true slave” that white women see in their own history. True, the black woman did the housework, the drudgery; true, she reared the children, often alone, but she did all of that while occupying a place on the job market, a place her mate could not get or which his pride would not let him accept. And she had nothing to fall back on: not maleness, not whiteness, not ladyhood, not anything. And out of the profound desolation of her reality she may very well have invented herself. —Toni Morrison, “What the Black Woman Thinks About Women’s Lib,” The New York Times, 1971

Her skin was noticeably darker, darker than mine even, and I felt a welt of pride. I had always coveted darker-skinned women their color. There was a mystery to their beauty that I found hypnotizing, Siren-like. They were hardly ever in Jet or Ebony or Essence, the magazines we subscribed to, unless they themselves were famous—the mom from The Fresh Prince of Bel Air, Whoopi Goldberg, Jackie Joyner, Oprah. Most of the Black women the public pronounced beautiful looked like Mama. Black Barbies. Bright. Hair wavier than curly. Petite figures. So, when my Auntie August opened that door, and I saw that her skin was so dark it reflected all the other colors surrounding it—the yellow of the morning light, the yellow of the door, the peach tan of the calico cat weaving in and out of Mya’s short legs—I knew that the aunt I could barely remember was, in and of herself, a small, delicious miracle.

“It’s a sight, ain’t it? And after all these years, I can’t get used to it. Mountains. How did they even come to be? Sometimes I sit in that shop all day wondering. Don’t make no sense to me how a fella can question the existence of God waking up to mountains like that every morning. All the proof I need.

she was helping to raise her baby sister, August—well, her half sister, technically, but her whole sister in every way that mattered.

In bocca al lupo.

Mya had been afraid the house was haunted. But I’d say, What them dead white folk going to do? Turn off the lights? Still, Mya had insisted that the pink nightlight above our stack of books be turned on nightly.

August hated to sing in church. The crying, the speaking in tongues, and the grown men falling to their knees terrified her. All because she had hit that perfect high-C note? Folk are ridiculous, August gathered.

“You’re lucky I’m pregnant, too,” she shot back in an alto she never knew she possessed, staring him straight in the eye with pure wrath in her heart. “Because if I had the strength,” she said, raising a quivering arm to point at the large magnolia in her yard. “I’d hang you right there. Right from that tree. Watch your body rot. Picnic underneath it.”

All of Douglass—the teenagers in love, the tired workingmen, the even more tired womenfolk—all of them stood on the steps of the porch of the house Myron had built for Hazel, stood on the lawn, climbed up in the branches of the magnolia and found seats where they could. The people in the neighborhood stood watch that night. Stood there all night. Not a one saying a word. Stood watch over Hazel and her baby. Some of the men fetched their old war uniforms. Stood saluting the house. That whole night.

I loved history, but truth be told, I wouldn’t fully pay attention unless we were studying the Civil War or Stalingrad or the Battle of the Marne. Wars fascinated me. How on earth could a sane man charge into a volley of bullets—say, at D-Day? Weren’t they terrified? The odds of surviving something like the Marne or Shiloh were so, so small. Didn’t the men know that? Standing there, waiting for death? Knowing they were walking straight into harm’s way? Didn’t they know that it didn’t matter who they were or whom they loved or what else they’d gone through, bombs or bullets would take them down just the same.

Whatever ability I had as an artist, I knew I owed it to my Creator. Yes, I practiced at it. Drew everything I saw since I was old enough to hold a pencil. But that was my Catholic duty: to exercise this gift.

She should have left that son of a bitch sooner. Should have come home the moment, the very first time, he hit her.

The things women do for the sake of their daughters. The things women don’t. The shame of it all.

“Men and death. Men and death. How on earth y’all run the world when all y’all have ever done is kill each other?”

That morning, while August slept, her mother had awoken Miriam with her favorite meal: breakfast. Miriam found fried green tomatoes, shrimp and grits, fried salt pork, spicy scrambled eggs over rice, and buttery cornbread muffins to soak it up all laid out on the kitchen table.

I never knew a smile could be another, better thing until I saw Mya’s face. Never knew it could be the sun itself, stretching on and on, warming us all.

She wasn’t sure what it was about her chair, but it could bring out the innermost secrets of the most hardened individual God ever made. The Black women of Memphis confessed to her everything: their infidelities, the children they loved and the children they did not, their hallucinations in the morning, their prayers at night. August knew the favorite psalm and favorite sexual position of every woman worth a damn within a ten-mile radius. Stylists in the South were priests. And this was the only religion August felt she ever needed.

The first year after Myron died, she had refused to speak to God. Whenever she passed by the spot near the large sleigh bed where she had usually bent knee and spoken to her Father, she would spit at it instead. The second year after Myron’s death, when Miriam caught whooping cough, Hazel finally broke down and spoke to God. Demanded He save her child. Said she would come there herself, come to those pearly gates and shake them down with her own two hands, if He dared, dared, take another human being from her. She vowed she’d haunt God. Stalk the Son of a Bitch throughout the decades, if He dared take her daughter. When Miriam pulled through, after nights of Miss Dawn chanting over the toddler and burning frankincense, Hazel dropped to her knees and recited her favorite psalm: “I will tell the world of all thy marvelous works.”