Joy. Marsha Hunt

was singing that night in my kitchen while I dished up two plates of supper for the girls, and was about as happy as I recalled being the morning in ’45 when Freddie come back to me in New Orleans from overseas after the war. Both times my feet wasn’t touching the ground, and both times Freddie B noticed.

      ‘Happy as a sandboy, ain’t ch’you, wife?’ he said slapping me on my behind, and Joy blushed as she caught him doing it, ’cause she had just walked in the kitchen. ‘You wasn’t s’posed to see that,’ he said swooping her off her feet and lifting her on his shoulders. ‘Baby Palatine –’ Freddie talked like Joy, who had taken off her party dress when Brenda did and was in her flannelet pajamas, wasn’t there.

      He practically had her head touching the ceiling ’cause she was so high up perched on my husband’s shoulders – ‘you reckon Dorothy Dandridge looked like Joy Bang when she was little? I bet Dorothy wasn’t as pretty,’ he said and reached his long arm up to tickle Joy under her armpits ’cause that’s where he knew she was the most ticklish.

      She got to giggling and struggling so, I feared she was gonna fall, and said, ‘Y’all get out of my kitchen with that foolishness, ’cause next thing you know there’ll be a accident and Tammy’ll want to tan my hide.’

      And the whole truth was that I didn’t want to never do nothing again that could upset Tammy, ’cause I saw how easy it was for her to turn her children against me.

      After that breakup we’d had, I vowed to watch my mouth, hold my tongue and never ask too many questions or say nothing that would make Tammy force Joy to stop being friends with me again. So I didn’t dare breathe another word about Joy not having baby pictures, though it was still puzzling why her daddy didn’t take none, and I wasn’t goofy enough to mention Sherman’s name, even if Tammy brought him up, ’cause she made it plain she didn’t want him talked about unless she was doing the talking. And as I noticed that the kids never mentioned him, nor Wilmington, I sure wasn’t gonna stick both feet in my mouth neither.

      With that call that Sunday evening being from John Dagwood, just like Miss Joy suspected, Sherman didn’t get mentioned much therein after no way.

      Tammy was spellbound with ‘John Dagwood this’ and ‘John Dagwood that’. If she’d of been a Catholic, I reckon she should of bowed her head everytime she said Dagwood’s name, like them Catholics is suppose to when they mention Jesus Christ.

      I didn’t meet Dagwood right away, but Freddie’d give me a good enough description of him ’fore he ever set foot through Tammy’s door, ’cause soon as Joy and Brenda’d had themselves something to eat and went home, I couldn’t wait to hear Freddie B tell me all about this man that they’d met in the emergency ward.

      ‘He seemed a nice enough fella,’ Freddie said dragging every word out like he’d said something worth spending a minute over. ‘I think he was from Chicago.’

      ‘Tammy said Detroit,’ I corrected him. ‘And if you ain’t gonna get it right, don’t tell it,’ I scolded Freddie B. ‘Was he nice looking?’

      ‘How’m I ’sposed to know that,’ Freddie said, like a blind man.

      ‘’Cause you saw him, didn’t you?’

      ‘Yeah, I saw him, but then I saw a whole lot of people setting round that emergency room, and I’d be a’ lyin’ if I told you I knew what any of them looked like.’

      I think Freddie B can be ridiculous when he’s so busy minding what he claims is his own business that he don’t know what’s going on around him. He was that way back then when Tammy met Dagwood, and he’s still that way.

      But I wasn’t gonna let him get away with not describing the man that Tammy had been talking to, ’cause inasmuch as she kept saying she wasn’t interested in no men, it was kind of juicy to think that she’d stumbled on something at that hospital.

      ‘Was he brown skinned,’ I asked my husband who had his head stuck in the paper.

      ‘’Bout my color,’ said Freddie B without looking up.

      ‘I don’t believe that Tammy’d have no eyes for a nigger black as you,’ I said. And I didn’t. She struck me as the sort that was color conscious and would have shied away from any man as deep chocolate as my husband.

      ‘Okay then,’ said Freddie just to aggravate. ‘He was white. White as this here tablecloth.’ Which was on the dining table where Freddie B had the funnies spread out beside the sports page.

      ‘Freddie B! Stop fooling around, now, and pay attention,’ I fussed.

      ‘Okay.’ He didn’t never have the nerve to tease me too long ’cause he knew I’d get in a huff and wouldn’t say nothing to him for a whole hour and he couldn’t stand it. ‘Okay. He was about my color. Honest, Baby, and he had him a thick mustache that looked like he’d been combing some Brylcreem on it cause it was shining.’

      ‘Nice looking?’

      ‘Yeah. What you women would call nice looking, but his hands felt like he ain’t never done a day’s work. Soft as Tammy’s they was when he stood up and shook mine as we was leaving the hospital. I heard him tell Tammy that he was looking for work and I told him to come down on the site I’m working in Palo Alto, but he said he hadn’t never done no building work. I believe it too with hands like a woman’s. I told him all he had to know how to do was use a shovel if he didn’t have no bricking trade like me, but he still wasn’t interested.’

      ‘Tall?’ I didn’t care as much about John Dagwood’s employment details as I did about if he was good looking. Some women, and I took Tammy rightly to be one of them, only want them a handsome man, but I listened to my mama who told me never to get hooked up with no pretty niggers ’cause they wasn’t nothing but trouble, and thought their asses weighed a ton. That’s how come I was glad to end up with Freddie B, ’cause even when he was young, he looked like the Sad Sack with his slow lanky self. Not that he was dim-witted. Just snail slow. But give him some arithmetic and he could add sums faster than all us, including my brother Caesar who used to get As in math’matics all the time.

      ‘That Dagwood fella wasn’t tall as me,’ said Freddie B, still with his head in the paper.

      ‘Well that don’t mean nothing, ’cause who is tall as you but them basketball players?’

      ‘Wasn’t tall, wasn’t short,’ Freddie B added.

      ‘Thank God she ain’t taking up with no short ass,’ I said, ’cause that was something else my mama warned me off. ‘Short ass men got a chip on they shoulder,’ she used to tell me and Helen.

      ‘If you sit patient,’ said Freddie B, ‘you’re likely to see him for yourself, ’cause Tammy told him to come on by whenever he wanted, and with as much jawing as they did in them three hours we was hanging ’round that hospital, I don’t guess he’ll keep her waiting long.’

      ‘Why didn’t you tell me that! You knew that all along, and was gonna keep it back!’

      Remembering back on that evening when I was setting with my husband who didn’t have his bald patch on the crown and wasn’t wearing spectacles yet ’cause he was still young, reminded me that I wasn’t in Oakland in our old place on Grange but was standing in our apartment in San Francisco in such a trance thinking ’bout the past, I hadn’t told Freddie nothing yet and was forgetting to deal with Tammy.

      If something bad really had happened to Joy, it wasn’t Christian of me to be feeling sorry for myself when I should have been on the phone giving her mama some comfort and telling my husband that our Godsent child was dead. It didn’t matter what I thought about Tammy’s brand of mothering, wasn’t a woman living that wanted to bury her own child.

      So I stood Joy’s snag-a-tooth picture that I was still holding back on the mantelpiece and let