Quiet as it's kept - short story - Black Women's Culture Issue

African American Review, Summer, 1994 by Sheryl T. Hawkins

When Mother got close to talk, I moved away. There wasn't anything wrong with Mother. Not really. She still had a pleasant smell about her--Moonlight Rose, I think. Her body was attractive, for an older woman.

Maybe that was my problem. My friends were always telling me that she looked too young to be my mother. A cousin or an older sister, maybe. At first, when I'd hear those words from deacons at church or greasy mechanics or clerks at the store (always men, always), I'd smile and look up at her and smile again. They'd look from her to me and me to her and shake their heads. "Uncanny," they'd say. But now that my friends had remarked on our resemblance, I felt uneasy about it. I didn't want to be like her. Stabbed in the back by my own mother. How could I talk to her, anyway?

Mother wanted to talk about the ice man.

"He made $5 last Sunday at the Simpson's barbeque," she'd say. Or, "I swear, I swear ... kids sure do take to Jimmy."

Jimmy, that was his godawful name.

I was walking home from school, thinking about Mother, thinking about school, just thinking in general about me when the crunchy sound of gravel on the road interrupted my thoughts. I'd heard the same noise at night. The sound grated on my nerves, making me think again of Mother, and of talking to her. I didn't want to talk to her. She would win, and I wanted to show her that I didn't need her like I did when I was a small child.

I put the school books down, pressed my spine against a fat, brown leafy tree, and tried to think about Mother and how she was when Dad was alive--before the gangrene had set in his foot, bloating it up real scary big. Before he started sleeping all the time. His death certificate said emphysema, a funny sounding word. Sometimes when I was thinking about Daddy she would say, "You use to tell me you loved me, before. What happened?"

I'd say, "Nuthfin," to irritate her. I'd been saying nuthfin this and nuthfin that, and I ain't gon do dis nor dat. Just trying to mess with her. She wanted us kids to speak proper English. And that's what all my friends were saying--Nuthfin. Somebody would ask you for a sip of soda and you'd say, "Nuthfin." The boys began calling the teachers "nuths" because nuthfin came out of their mouths that we could use.

You see, there was this big campaign going on by some town folks to help the hill folks speak better. Us. If a child went the entire month speaking good English, we got a free ticket to the cinema. All Mother had to do was say we'd been talking proper. That's all. Just say it, say the words they wanted to hear, and I could go. But she wouldn't.

Lately, Mother had been asking about the cuts and pricks on the back of my blouses. (Between a paragraph or two of Jimmy, Jimmy, Jimmy, and Jimmy.) It could drive you crazy. She was always smiling and laughing and looking in the mirror. Humming bits of songs to herself--songs I'd heard over the radio--teenagers' songs. Preening, I think my grandmother would have called it. She started wearing my scarfs, especially the multicolored ones. When I would ask her, "Why are you stealing my stuff?" she'd say, "Stealing, stealing? Look here girl, who buys this stuff anyway?" (She'd spread her arms out wide, twirling her hands a bit.) She'd forgotten that granddad had bought everything in his house.

We moved here about a year ago, after the social worker in Wedowee, West Virginia, stopped by the house to check on us kids. "Your neighbors were concerned," she'd said. Mother had forgotten how she hadn't bought any food, or cooked anything for that matter. Everything to do with the house had fallen on somebody else. One of the neighbors had told. She'd forgotten, or had amnesia or something. I don't know because we don't talk too much about the time after Daddy died.

The branches on either side of the road closed off the sky, like a shutter or something, and all I could see were bits of peeking blue. Baby blue and white were my high school colors. My favorites. That's why I'd joined the cheerleading squad. I had missed practice, claiming I had cramps, even though my stomach was hurting. I should have gone directly home to talk to Mother. He would be there, though.

The ice man came from up north. Mother wanted to go up north. So she learned about the north from the ice man. He said there were lots of big breaks there. Everybody in town talked to him about it, making him out to be a big shot. He delivered ice to the hill people and told bits of gossip on everybody. His baggy overalls (that's what he wore everyday) sagged in the butt every time he carried the ice from the wagon to dump it on somebody's back porch. A floppy hat covered the red plaid rag tied around his slicked hair (a do'rag, they called it up north). For the last four months, he'd spent Saturday nights with Mother. From my grandfather's stone house, I would watch him drive up the hill and stop at the foot of grandfather's thirty steps to take the do'rag off, pat his hair. The light from the moon magnified his hairdo, which glistened like the sweat I'd seen on a black coal miner's back after an accident. Us kids would run to the mine when the alarm rang, and we'd watch as body after crushed body was pulled up.