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The Hatwearer's Lesson PROLOGUE Grandma Ollie broke down her Sunday hat the way the setting sun puts a crease in the evening sky. She had perfected the technique with the help of her big sister, Lula, back in Arkansas, some sixty years ago; a sister she still grieved for to this very day. Breaking down a hat is a family trait just like blue veins beneath red-boned skin, sultry eyes, or book smarts. Grandma Ollie had been determined to pass perfection of that trait on to her granddaughter, Terri. When Terri was fourteen they took a road trip from the city to the South to visit some kin. Southern girls loved to wear their Sunday hats. The hats, draped with lace, blossoming with color, were crowns that granted the wearer sovereignty wherever she went. Grandma Ollie introduced her granddaughter, Terri, to the power of the brim. She showed Terri how to press the fold, tilt the hat forward, drop the brim real low. It gave off a special attitude and left the wearer, well, might as well g’on and tell the truth, damn near legally blind. “How am I supposed to look where I’m going?” Terri had asked in the loft of a frame house in Collingswood, Arkansas. “Chile-chile!” Grandma Ollie sucked wind. “The only looking you need to worry about is looking good.” “Well, can’t I see some?” “How much?” “More than Stevie Wonder.” Grandma Ollie tilted the hat to the right. “Now there. Use your left eye.” “What am I? A sewing needle? I need more than one eye!” And hadn’t Terri been right? Sure enough when she came prancing across the room that day to go to church she didn’t see the cellar hatch open. What did a city girl know about cellars? Terri stepped where the floor ought to have been and fell straight down to where she had no business being. Luckily there was a pile of old clothes for her to land on in the root cellar. Both of Terri’s shoes flipped crossways on the tips of her toes. Her skinny legs folded together at the knees. Terri’s hat sailed off. A patch of hair stood up dry as a wick. The girl was dangerous. Her body was sign language for “T-N-T.” Grandma Ollie hollered down from the great room upstairs, “Hello down there. You all right?” “Yeah.” “Sure?” “Yeah.” “Well, since you down there, bring up one of them jugs.” Grandma Ollie chuckled at the memory now as she continued to examine herself in the mirror. This was her favorite hat for two reasons. One, it was a Mother’s Day present from Terri, the child she raised who had been both blessed and cursed with her ways. And two, because the hat was flaming violet, the color of Grandma Ollie’s early days of womanhood, and had a band wide and unbroken like her nerve, and a feather that flared when it had a mind to, like her temper. Grandma Ollie savored her reflection in the mirror. She remembered how her hair once flowed red and wild. How her hips once swayed sturdy and smooth like a rocking chair. How when she used to laugh, her cheeks had the roll, the sparkle, and the puff of soapy dishwater. How she danced and her feet went exactly where they should without tiring. Grandma Ollie knew she had been swindled. She thought, There should be a law against it; wonder what that low-down dirty dog Time has done with all my stuff? Time ripped her off. Traded her black hair color out of a bottle, pain reliever in a tube, blush in a compact, and a cane she folded up and slid under the bed at night. Grandma Ollie figured she’d been cheated worse than the Indians who swapped Manhattan for a bag of beads. At least they got some jewelry out of the deal. Yes Lord. Grandma
Ollie tweaked the hat until it defied gravity. She investigated
herself from tip to top. Her lilac dress, laced around the rolled
collar, fit to form. Grandma Ollie was pleased with herself: “You
together.” Grandma Ollie plopped down in her double-cushioned chair by the window. She would wait patiently for her ride to Wednesday night prayer meeting. She snapped her white gloves against flushed palms before opening up her Bible. The first page read, “Given To:” Her father had written in his fifth-grade hand her name and the date . . . Olivia Anderson. June 4, 1935. She flipped to the page entitled, “Marriages.” There, written in her own hand was . . . Olivia Anderson engaged to Wesley Strong on April 19, 1943. Beneath that she’d written . . . Married August 28, 1944, ‘til death do them part. Grandma Ollie lovingly traced Wesley’s name with her fingertips. She missed her husband of more than half a century. She’d taken his death hard. Had it not been for Terri, no telling what she might have done. Thinking of Terri! Lord have mercy. Terri and that handsome boy Derek had gotten engaged more than a month ago. And Grandma Ollie hadn’t set it down. Where was her mind? Grandma Ollie took a pen out of the cup holder on the windowsill and began to write . . . Terri Mills engaged to . . . Then the brand-new pen up and died; ran completely out of ink. Got dry as graveyard bones. Grandma Ollie couldn’t write the boy’s name down in the Bible. This was sho’ nuff a sign. A sign can be a dream or an unusual gesture by a person or by nature. Life is full of signs. Grandma Ollie was one of the few who could read them. “Something’s wrong-wrong,” she said as her eyes scissored shut. Grandma Ollie closed the Bible and started to pray. She did not pray for herself, but for her heart up north÷her granddaughter, Terri, whose life had almost been lost twice in two rivers. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ CHAPTER ONE The first river was in the womb. Terri was the child of Grandma Ollie’s daughter, Magpie. She was given the nickname Magpie in the little country town of Collingswood, Arkansas. During the great migration, colored folks gathered up all things held dear and packed them into big, bulky cardboard suitcases. Happily, they boarded trains and jilted the Jim Crow South, leaving it behind them like the stiff, black rails that carried them north. But they carried with them country ways, still loving their floral aprons, white shoes after Labor Day, and don’t you know, nicknames like Skeeter, June Bug, and Magpie. Magpie had fallen in love with James. He was a Collingswood boy. The children were as inseparable as back and front. Magpie and James began their lives together toddling along Arkansas’s dirt roads. They were thick as angels. The sun would toast their necks and the breeze would bounce their giggles over yonder the way little children skip pebbles cross-stream. When
both Magpie and James were only five years old, James’s family
and Grandma Ollie and her husband, Wesley, brought their families
north. Together, the two families thought they could make it. But the train ride had been so tiring that they stopped in Chicago instead; a colored porter swore up and down to them that Bill “Bojangles” Robinson and other famous folk like that loved to visit the Windy City too. As time passed, the children got fly, shame of their starched country clothes and out-of-style shoes. They picked up slang as teenagers. Magpie’s sweaters got tighter and James’s hats got to hanging off his ear. The cooler they got, the wilder they got. Magpie became pregnant with James’s baby. Did she slow down? No. She and James still followed the light; the light of the marquee that glowed in front of the trendy colored nightclubs. It was inside one of these nightclubs that pain crippled Magpie. She doubled over. Everyone assumed she must have had too much to drink again÷like James, who was passed out in a back booth. But a river had grown inside of her÷and Magpie hadn’t even noticed it, this being her seventh month. Drinking hard liquor and hardly any water, her stomach had ballooned. Unhappy with James and the life they were living, she had been depressed and drank more. And the river of her discontentment grew and grew. It was that river that was raging all around Terri in the womb. Grinding in her ears in the womb. Tickling the bottoms of her delicate feet. Washing against her stretched, pained skin. Battering against her developing spirit. That river had begun to drown Terri, the unborn child. How had Magpie known? Because of the sign. Grandma Ollie had read it, not two weeks before. She watched as a nest of birds made a home on a branch outside the kitchen window of their tiny cold-water flat. Magpie was sitting there, eating jam and biscuits, catching a breeze, when the birds, startled by the sound of a train whistle, bolted. Water, nestled among the leaves from a late night rain, splattered Magpie’s cotton top and ran down her stomach like a river. Tears formed in Grandma Ollie’s eyes as she watched that river crawl along the girl’s stomach, which now looked huge and purplish beneath the cotton cloth, and she knew. “Magpie, I’ve got a bad feeling. Stay home these next few nights, please.” Magpie chuckled, a firm, tart laugh; admonishing Grandma Ollie for hoarding her country ways. Magpie wasn’t near due÷only seven months and she was big÷from cola drinks and nothing more. But it was the river. Magpie staggered forward in the nightclub, speechless from fear, feet driven to make it back to her mother’s door, through desolate streets, slick and awash with mist from a sky that couldn’t decide whether to merely pout or cry outright. Let me make it, Magpie prayed. Let me make it. Only her mother’s hands could pull this baby from the river. She could see that now . . . not like before when Magpie had been blind from anger at poverty, at James’s philandering, at the shattered promises of the world. No need for a hospital. Doctors? Who? Not them. She wanted to save this baby, and only her hatwearing, sign-reading mother could. But would her mother be able to save her? “My child, my child,” Grandma Ollie said when Magpie fell at her feet not more than five steps into the front room. The
hardwood floor cried out as her body jerked uncontrollably. “Save
the baby, Mama, save the baby.” The
prayers that leapt from Grandma Ollie’s lips were spoken in
some sacred tongue that graced only the mouths of mothers in distress
and could be understood only by the ears of angels. And she rubbed. . . . Her thoughts traveled over miles of memory, some hers, some divine from her mother’s spirit, others belonging to ancestors she’d only seen pictures of . . . They came to mind and helped Grandma Ollie now as she prayed and rubbed. The river broke and Grandma Ollie knelt before the rush of water, told Magpie to push, to push her baby forward, and she would pull, save her from this raging river. And through all this Terri came into the world and her mother Magpie left it. Terri’s first sight was her mother’s spirit leaving, and that made her forever long for something that was missing. So she was born with a soul that opened up inside of her like a web. It was complicated and fragile, invisible to the naked eye of others until they got close enough to get caught up in it. Terri would play with her toes in her handmade crib and stop, suddenly, little brow wrinkling, unsure of what, but knowing something was missing. When Terri was seven, her father, James, had agonized enough over his guilt about Magpie’s death; it filled his shoes like itchy feet and made it hard for him to stay in one place. So one day he told Terri that he loved her very much. And then James left. Terri waited and waited, looking out of the window, waiting for her daddy. She watched the sun go down and the moon come out. But he never returned. So Terri always seemed to be waiting, waiting for the return of things. Grandma Ollie raised her, loved her like her own, of course, because she had pulled Terri from the river. But Terri would be hesitant to fully trust any other love that was shown to her; skeptical, she thought that somehow there was something missing from it or that if pure, it would mysteriously vanish. Terri began to collect things, material things, dolls, toys, things to help fill the void: the void of what was missing and what had left. Never was she stingy with the things that she collected for comfort, but still she needed them, felt secure with them. Grandma Ollie had feared that at some point Terri would begin to covet material things instead of merely appreciating them. So she made sure that many of the things were somehow earned, through extra chores or academic achievements. And as Terri’s childhood turned into adolescence, and her adolescence turned into adulthood, Grandma Ollie’s fear shifted. She knew that somehow, some way, Terri would have to learn to accept and trust the love of others, but how could she help that learning begin? —Reprinted from The Hatwearer's Lesson by Yolanda Joe by permission of Plume, a member of Penguin Group (USA). Copyright © Yolanda Joe, 2004. All rights reserved. This excerpt, or any parts thereof, may not be reproduced in any form without permission. |