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“What she wanted was you, but didn’t say why. She didn’t look good at all, Robert.” She added hastily, “Not that I ever had much contact with her, obviously.”
“You think she’s sick?”
“You’re not a doctor.”
“She have family around?” Jack asked.
“Yes. Her husband’s long dead. But she has children and now grandchildren. Maybe great-grandchildren,” she added ruefully, making Jack sense his mother was thinking that she had none of those future generations lined up.
Jack went over to the door and stared up the street to the only house in the neighborhood that didn’t look like all the others. A retired lawyer by the name of Ashby owned it. And he’d added to it over the years, usually when he’d gotten a big client, or made a few bucks in the stock market. Thus, it was rambling and had oddly mitered wings and loose joints.
Jack had read that there had been nearly one hundred slaves on the sprawling plantation once situated here. They and their progeny had labored all their lives for not one penny in return to make their wealthy owners richer still. Almost nothing had been recorded about them other than their actual numbers. And that reportage was apparently solely done for the benefit of their master’s ego.
Ashby had six children, all long grown now and with their own families to run. His wife had died many years ago, but not of illness. Well, Jack supposed it was a sickness to go to your garage, stuff a towel in the tailpipe of your Plymouth, lie across the front seat dressed in your finest cocktail dress, and, sipping on a Mason jar of Old Fashioned, start the engine, and stay there until you were dead. Ashby had reputedly focused his final years on imbibing as many bottles of Rebel Yell bourbon whiskey as he possibly could.
Miss Jessup was Ashby’s maid, cook, and nurse; Jack had never known her first name. Years before Jack had been born, she had gone to work for the lawyer and his family. Now she was probably single-handedly keeping the old man alive.
Growing up, Jack and all the other children in the neighborhood always called the woman Miss Jessup, the only sign of respect she probably ever received on the western side of Freeman County, and the only attention, too, unless items went missing and someone was needed to blame or indict. She was the only Black person who ever came around here, which lent her a certain novelty, at least in the eyes of the white youngsters.
He flicked his gaze back to his mother. “What did she say other than she wanted to talk to me?”
Hilly deftly pulled a heavy glass vase from Lucy’s clutching fingers before saying, “Nothing. She walked right in the front door without a by-your-leave and just asked for you. But she was upset, so I made allowances.”
“It’s not like Miss Jessup’s a stranger. We’ve known her a long time.”
“We don’t really know her kind.”
“Times are changing,” he said, not really wanting to go there on his birthday.
She pursed her lips. “I’m sure she’d feel the same way if I barged into her house. Tell all her friends about that crazy white woman and how she came barging into her house.”
“So what did you tell her then?”
“That you’d be here for dinner and that I didn’t appreciate her intruding. Scared poor Lucy half to death. Took me forever to calm her down.”
She reached out and hugged placid Lucy to her bosom.
“Okay, but how did you leave it with her?” Jack asked patiently.
“I didn’t leave it any which way with her. I just asked her to leave.”
“Just like that?” he said, clearly annoyed.
His mother checked her slim Timex. “You were born one minute ago, Robert. Happy birthday, son.”
CHAPTER 4
COMING HOME FROM DELIVERING THE morning paper Jack would sometimes see Miss Jessup get off the bus that stopped at the corner. She always exited from the rear. He wondered why that was so until, as a teenager, he rode the bus one day into the city with his brother, and found that all the Blacks congregated in the back, while all the whites gathered in the front. Each group seemed to willingly accept this arrangement as fine, and thus so did he and his brother.
Jack would wave to her as he sailed past on his Schwinn bike, and she would wave back. Some mornings she looked tired and spent as though the mere act of living had done her in, while other times she looked full of fire, her eyes searching for a fight. He would think about this as he rode home and then his mind would turn to other things, and Miss Jessup’s meager place there was always crowded out until next he saw her.
Occasionally she would call out to him. “How you doin’, honey?” Or, as he got older, “You lookin’ more like your daddy every day. Move like he do, too. With a swagger,” she added, smiling, which made him smile in return.
Sometimes she would ask if he had a spare newspaper. She would tuck it away in her bag, and always thank him profusely.
“You’re certainly welcome, Miss Jessup,” he would say back because his parents had taught him to be unfailingly polite to all.
“Rich, poor, colored, white,” his father would say. “We’re all God’s children. We all deserve kindness and respect. We may not break bread with colored folks, but we don’t break bread with rich folks, either. Did little colored children have a say where they were born? No, they did not. You don’t have to marry one or have a meal with them to respect the fact that they’re people, too. You remember that, boys, and pass it on.”
