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THE SUN HOVERED BEHIND A PINK HAZE THAT ENgulfed all of St. Louis that Indian summer of 1959. Th e sun was a singular preoccupation with Betsey. She rose with it at least once a week. She'd shake Sharon or Margot outta they beds and run to the back porch on the second floor to watch the horizon set a soft blaze to the city. Their house allowed for innumerable perspectives of the sun. From the terrace off Betsey's room, where she was not 'sposed to stand, she could see the sun catty-cornered over the Victorian houses that dotted the street, behind maples and oaks grown way over the roofs of the sleeping families. On her street you could name the families without children in one breath. Why, one reason to live there was cause there were so many children. Only the Blackmans directly cross from Betsey with their pillars and potted dwarf plants didn't like children, which must be why they didn't have any. In the wintertime Mrs. Blackman would come running out in her furs, shouting for everybody to get off her lawn, even though it was the best one for sledding cause there were two slopes. Whatta shame she couldn't understand that. Yet seen from the terrace, when the dawn came in the winter, Mrs. Blackman's dwarfed plants wrapped in shields of ice glistened like rainbows. Betsey never told Mrs. Blackman that. She didn't mention the shadows of the nuns dressing in the convents, either. There was a preciousness to St. Louis at dawn or dusk that was settling to the child in the midst of a city that rankled with poverty, meanness, and shootings Betsey was only vaguely aware of.
The sun and the stairways protected her, gave her a freedom that was short-lived but never failing. Her house sat on a small hill and there were stairs that went to the front door, but you could use the same stairs to go anywhere around the house cause the stairs also led to a porch that went all the way round the side of the house. That's how come nobody could ever tell exactly where Grandma was. She could be anywhere on that porch just watching you do wrong. Then there were the back stairs, only three of them: one, two, three wooden ones, all creaky and needing paint. Underneath those stairs Betsey helped a stray cat have babies. She lined up worms and rocks. She lay flat on her back sometimes, being quiet and unseen, while everybody went looking for her or while everybody was coming up the steps. She heard a lot of secrets lying under the back stairs. Heard a lot of kissing. Now, kissing is hard to hear, but Charlie kissed back there sometimes. Jane and Greer were always kissing. The stairs to the basement were magnificently narrow, like a dungeon the basement was. In the summer it was ever so cool and in the winter it was warm. Betsey didn't know why more of the family didn't covet the basement. Maybe it was on account of the dark and the smell. It smelled funny down there. Jane said that white folks usedta make the colored help sleep down there. Now that Jane would never do, put a Negro in the basement.
But the best stairs were the back stairs that went all the way to the third floor. These stairs turned this way and then that. Why, a body would hide in a cranny on those stairs and never be found. They were dark, too, a blackish wood gainst blackish walls like servants should never see the light of day. Betsey loved the back stairs that led to the littlest porch on the third floor, which Jane never warned her about, cause Jane'd never seen it, Betsey 'sposed. From there, on fall mornings, in her pajamas and overcoat, Betsey watched the dawn come up over the steeple of the church way down Union Boulevard, past Soldan and the YMHA. The bells would cling a holy cling that no one in the house could hear. They used alarm clocks.
So Betsey had fashioned parameters of her own for the house she shared with everyone else. The only real problem was doors. Every room was connected to another room by a door and Jane forbade anyone to lock the doors. The second floor was a pathway of bedrooms with a hallway right next to it. Only Charlie's room wasn't connected to anything and that was because he was in high school. Betsey didn't see what kinda reason that was to have a room that wasn't connected to everybody else's. That's why Betsey liked to be up before everyone else, out on one of her porches, taking in the world all on her own. There she made up stories or just stayed out of the fracas Sharon, Margot, and Allard would be making all the time. Sound traveled uncannily in this house and everybody was always yelling to everybody else. Arguing all the time. Howdy-Doody or American Bandstand, Little Rock or Amos and Andy.
Alone on her balcony, Betsey luxuriated in the quietness, letting her thoughts ramble.
"Speak up Ike, an' 'spress yo'se'f," Betsey murmured, remembering yesterday afternoon on Union Boulevard when Willetta and Susan Ann had ripped into each other over that basketball champ with the good hair, Benny. Betsey kept trying to remember how Willetta's bra looked and how Susan Ann had scratched Willetta's face with the longest red nails. She was certain that the black-laced bra and the red nails had something to do with the way Mr. Paul Laurence Dunbar wanted her to say, "Speak up Ike, an' 'spress yo'se'f." Some sultry willing- to- fight- over- you,- if- you- give- me- a-chance way of saying the line. Today Mrs. Mitchell was having the elocution contest for Class 7B, Betsey's class, with the kids from cross the tracks and the kids from the right side of em too. Willetta and Susan Ann had gathered such a crowd round em, tearing at each other that way. And Benny, he just went on to the game gainst Sumner, like he didn't know nothin bout all this blood and swearing and cussing going on in his name. It was evil and wicked to fight, but Betsey wanted the grown woman bit of it to rub off on her today when she said, "Speak up Ike, an' 'spress yo'se'f."
"I told you, you had to be out of the bathroom in five minutes! What do you think I'm gonna do? Go to school stink on accounta you take so long, Margot," Sharon was screaming round the corner from Betsey's room. How could she become a great anything with all this foolishness going on around her?
"Listen here, heifer. I'm gonna be in that bathroom in three minutes or you never gonna play with my jacks and I'ma tell Jeannie not to speak to you ever again. Do you hear me? Do you hear me?"
Sharon was kicking the bathroom door with her saddles making black streaks long the sideboard when Jane rolled over in her bed to touch Greer, just once more before her hellish day began. Where was Betsey with her coffee? Why was Sharon shouting the devil out in the hall? How could all this be happening to her?
"Sharon, I am going to whip you good, if I hear you call your sister or anybody else a heifer. Do you hear me? Just wait your turn. The boys are finished and you'll have plenty of time." Jane managed to raise her voice, if not her body. Something had to be done with all these children. "Greer, please, let's not have any more children. But can we make a little bitty bit of love?" Jane was tustled in a mass of auburn hair. Somehow her lavender nightgown was entwined in her arms beneath the pillows. She rolled toward her husband, who, as always when in a good mood, grabbed her reddish ringlets and pulled her mouth to his. The answer was yes, a long and sweet yes.
"Betsey, Betsey, where's my coffee?" Jane breathed deep, longing for more of her Greer and that caffeine. She could smell the coffee perking downstairs, which meant that Mama was up and about, making lunches for all the children. "Betsey, where is my coffee?" Greer nuzzled a little closer and Jane simmered down and was all purr and open. She forgot about coffee.
Betsey wasn't even dressed, and she hadn't gotten her mama's coffee or her lines right yet. She ran like the Holy Ghost down the back stairs to set up Jane's cup and saucer before Grandma had to do it and broke something. "Speak up Ike, an' 'spress yo'se'f" rambling through her mind, her little girl hips twitched the way she imagined Susan Ann's had after she left Willetta in the street with nothing but her panties on. Not even a ponytail clasp was on that child once Susan Ann was done. Grandma sure enough had the coffee done.
"Seems to me a child could make an effort to take her hardworking mother a teeny ol' cup of coffee," Grandma murmured in her Carolinian drawl. There was a way about Vida that was so lilting yet direct that Betsey sometimes thought her grandma had a bloodline connection to Scarlett O'Hara.
"I'm sorry, Grandma, but I was practicing my elocution."
"You should have practiced your elocution last evening, instead of jumping all that colored double roping with those trashy gals from round the way."
Grandma poured her daughter's coffee, knowing full well what was goin on upstairs. Her daughter didn't have no common sense, that was the problem. Awready there was a house fulla chirren and she wouldn't stop messin' with that Greer. Jane was lucky, Grandma thought. None of the chirren looked like him, all dark and kinky-headed. Now it was true that Betsey had a full mouth. Margot was chocolate brown. Sharon had a head fulla nappy hair. Allard was on the flat-nosed side. But in Grandma's mind Jane had been blessed, cause each of the chirren was sprightly and handsome on a Geechee scale, not them island ones but the Charlestonians who'd been light or white since slavery. But Grandma didn't like to think bout slavery. She was most white. Slaves and alla that had nothing to do with her family, until Jane insisted on bringing this Greer into the family and he kept making family. Lord knows who could help her.
"Here, Betsey, you carry this on up to your mama, and tell her I said that Allard needs to be looked at for the ringworm and Charlie needs a whipping for calling Sharon out of her name and all the lunches are packed, but I do feel a mite weak and need to rest my bones. I do wish she would quit that old job social-workering and mind you chirren more. I surely do."
Betsey took the coffee from Grandma ever so carefully. She was running late. Her teeth weren't even brushed yet and Charlie was in the bathroom for the second time. Mama still didn't have her coffee, and wouldn't have it when she imagined, cause Betsey drank the whole cup by the time she reached the top of the back stairs that twisted this way and that, leaving a girl time to dream of things to come and womanish ways.
When Betsey reached the top of the winding stairs with the empty cup, she quickly swallowed the little bit that had dropped into the saucer and with military precision made an about face, balancing her mother's wedding china in one hand, feigning a fan in the other, whispering, "Speak up Ike, 'spress yo'se'f." She could hear Charlie and Sharon arguing about how long was the circumference of the world. Margot adding, "As big as your head." Betsey almost dropped the delicate flowered cup rimmed with gold, seemingly atop a throne of its own. Jane was strolling down the hall, shouting the other way, "Betsey, where's my coffee?"
Sharon was trying to comb Margot's head a hair with a brush that looked like it was only big enough for Betsy Wetsy. "I can't help it. It's the only one I could find." Margot was tying Allard's shoes as he looked around the ceilings for shadows where the spooks that swept down on him in his dreams must live. "I know they're up there, Sharon. Let's getta broom and beat em to the death. Okay?" Sharon had Margot making faces verging on distortion; that hair, that hair had to be combed or Mama was gonna have a fit. "Well, we could tie it with a shoestring in a ponytail," Sharon conceded. Margot smiled so much she cried one big tear. Allard kept trying to get their attention: "Listen, if you all don't help me beat out them spooks, I'm gonna burn em up."
Together Sharon and Margot shouted, "Allard, keep your hands off them matches, do you hear?" Jane heard. Greer was apparently downstairs, already strains of Charlie Parker waft ed through the house. Jane was powdering herself by her vanity in a gleam of nostalgia by her wedding photo. Oh that day had been so perfect, so soft and white. Whatta night they had at the Savoy. Why, she danced until she most fainted. Jane giggled and then regained her more official "mother's" stance as Betsey entered the room.
"Well, Betsey, I thought you must have gone all the way to Guatemala to get my coffee."
"No, Mommy, I just was practicing my elocution, when the kids were making all this noise and you wanted your coffee and Grandma insisted on telling me how lucky we look the way we look because of Daddy. There was an awful lot goin on, Mama, honest."
Jane smiled at her miracle child. The baby she thought she couldn't have. What an error of judgment that had been. Still and all, Betsey was her first baby and close to her heart in a peculiar way, as if some real part of her walked out the door every time Betsey went down the front stairs or leaned gossiping, girl-like, over the back porch. Jane pulled Betsey to her, then took a few sips of coffee made exactly how she liked, milk in first, two sugars. And plenty of coffee. Jane still insisted on having her good china and cloth napkins for her coffee upstairs. "There's no reason to give up everything gracious on account of a few moments of hardship" was what she always said if Betsey brought a paper napkin or a mug to her room.
"Mama, you wanna listen to a little bit of my elocution preparation? I'm doing Mr. Paul Laurence Dunbar."
Jane thought, taking her time mischievously, and then shook her head yes.
"Betsey, of course I want to hear your interpretation of Dunbar, but hurry. You know your daddy's getting the morning quiz ready."
Betsey ran to her mama's closet and grabbed the first red womany thing she saw, a scarlet slip she draped round her hips. Jane's eyebrows rose, but she contained herself. After all, elocution was close to theater. Betsey stationed herself by her mother in front of the vanity, wanting to watch her every gesture and facial expression. Mama knew this poem awready, so she had to be good, or at least that's what she thought.
Jane thought anything her little girl did was just fine, but it pleased her that Betsey wanted to impress her.
"Who dat knockin' at de do'?
Why, Ike Johnson, yes, fu' sho!
Come in, Ike. I's mighty glad
You come down. I t'ought you's mad
At me 'bout de othah night,
An was stayin' 'way fu' spite.
Say, now, was you mad fu' true
W'en I kin' o' laughed at you?
Speak up, Ike, an 'spress yo'se'f."
Betsey sashayed and threw her teeny hips, glinted her eyes, and coyly demonstrated her newly learned skills as coquette, much to her mother's delight. Jane hugged her girl and was about to offer some dramatic advice, when the morning rituals, authorized and unauthorized, overshadowed them and inter rupted that very special moment they'd shared.
"Who's got my geography book?"
"Come on, tie my shoes."
"That dress is not yours. Give it here."
"Lord, Lord, please help me with these chirren."
"I'ma tell Daddy you took my books."
"I bet you won't have no backside side, if he gets holdt to ya."
"Come tie my shoes, please."
"For God's sake, somebody tie Allard's shoes."
"Margot, you better do something with that mess you call hair."
"You said you would comb it for me."
"She sure 'nough did."
"Where's my geography book?"
"Somebody tie Allard's shoes, fore he trips over himself."
"I'ma tell Daddy." The refrain arose from everyone's lips.
No one could find Allard to tie his shoes. Meanwhile Greer had strapped his conga drum round his shoulder. It was the one he'd brought from Cuba where Sharon was conceived under a sky of shooting stars, or so the story went. As if he were a southern Mongo Santamaria, Greer mamboed up the back stairs, through the halls, and down the front steps, gathering the mass of family he called his own, chanting all the while.
"The Negro race is a mighty one
The work of the Negro is never done
Muscle, brains, and courage galore
Negroes in this house
Meet me at the back door
Oh! the Negro race is a mighty one
Excerpted from Betsey Brown: A Novel by Ntozake Shange.
Copyright © 1985 by Ntozake Shange.
Published in 1985 by St. Martin's Griffin
All rights reserved. This work is protected under copyright laws and reproduction is strictly prohibited. Permission to reproduce the material in any manner or medium must be secured from the Publisher.
