Mulberry. Paulette Boudreaux
stared at the unmistakable shape of the curled desperate baby beneath her flesh. I was at once horrified and awestruck. The baby wasn’t clawing, or scratching, or tearing its way out as Esther had said babies did to get born. Suddenly, I was aware that something frighteningly significant was happening to Momma and the baby. It went beyond Esther’s dark warnings about how babies came into the world, and it went beyond any of my small fears. I relaxed into Momma’s grip, wanting to enter into that place where she was—fearless, strong.
“Promise me you’ll take care of your brothers,” Momma said again, shaking me so I looked up to face the fierce pain in her eyes. “Promise me.” Her voice was a hoarse whisper.
“I promise,” I said, and to my own ears I sounded like an angry child.
Momma let go of my hands and leaned back on the bed, bracing herself with her arms. She closed her eyes, dropped her head back, and panted. I backed toward the door and bumped into Daddy. He put his hands on my shoulders and dug his fingers into my flesh. I turned to look up at him. His mouth hung open. His tongue was pressed against his bottom teeth. He had put the baby there, but he was helpless now that it wanted out. I turned back to Momma.
Her spine was curved in a graceful arch. The rounded outline of her breast and her belly rose like a lumpy mountain range at her center. Her breath was steady and shallow, moving in and out of her throat with the rhythmic precision of girls twirling a jump rope. Her image slid away from me like something seen through the wrong end of binoculars—far away and out of reach. She had become a work of art, a glass figurine that could be won as a prize at the state fair. Admiration washed over me like a warm sparkling liquid, slowing the thumping of my heart and calming my breath.
For a long moment I was suspended in a silent world with Momma where the air swirled around us like particles of light.
The moment passed, and Momma returned to herself, exhaling a long slow breath of satisfaction and relief. She lowered her head, sat up straight, looked at me, and smiled, a coconspirator’s smile that pulled me into the white-hot experience of pregnant womanhood. Her eyes, dark fiery slits of charcoal and ivory, beckoned, called me to acknowledge her world—a place of exquisite pain and joy. Did you see? they seemed to ask.
The palms of my hands still burned with the imprint of her fingernails. Of course I had seen. I had even felt. How could I not? Her world had been slowed down and magnified for my benefit. It was still hovering around me like a foreign landscape. I was aware of everything—the muffled heartbeat of the baby; the quiet heat of the pale yellow light cast by the suspended lightbulb; the tinny tick-tick-tick of metal pieces colliding to pass time inside the clock on Momma’s dresser; the slow gravity of the paint peeling in ugly patches from my parents’ metal bed frame; the quick rush of blood inside my own veins; the stoic worry hidden in Daddy’s heavy breath that brushed the back of my head each time he exhaled. I even felt the delicate joy of resting between the spasms of pain.
“Gene,” Momma said, turning her feverish gaze away from me.
Daddy grunted, released his grip on my shoulders, and moved toward Momma. I tumbled back to a heady reality, bloated with new knowledge.
I had seen enough. I wanted to get away and come back when Momma was no longer moving in and out of pain with animal beauty and the baby was swaddled in a soft blanket, peering out at me with vacant, dim eyes, humbled by its own helplessness.
The taxi came and I stood in the harsh light of the doorway and watched Momma, leaning on Daddy as they made their way along the river of light flowing from our house to the road. Daddy had one arm around her shoulders. His free hand held together the front edges of the fuzzy, dark-blue mohair sweater he had draped over her before they headed out of the house. She held a small, battered black suitcase in one hand.
Between the front porch and the taxi, another spasm overwhelmed Momma and my parents stopped in the middle of the yard. Momma dropped the suitcase and gripped Daddy’s arm with both hands. I imagined her fingernails digging into his arm, initiating him into the pain of what was happening in her now that the baby wanted to come into the world. Momma stood with her knees apart and slightly bent, her spine curved and taut like an Indian’s bow. “Lord Jesus, Lord Jesus, Lord Jesus …,” she begged.
Standing like that my parents became one object, a fountain centerpiece, connected as solidly as if they were metal pieces bound by a welder’s torch. Her hungry incantation was the water, blown upward from her throat and sent cascading back down, enclosing them in a world that excluded me.
I was seeing a hint of the unnamable thing that had drawn them together and compelled them to create—me, my brothers, this new baby. It surrounded them like a language only they knew. I wanted to run forward and put myself in the middle of their little world and disrupt it. They were too much of a mystery for me in those moments—as unreachable to me as the stars winking in the dark canopy of the night sky above them. That felt unbearable to me then. I wanted to see them as I always had—simple, transparent, ordinary grown-ups—not as mystery, not as a life-giving centerpiece out of which I had been carved and set forward in the world. I wanted them back the way they were before something made Momma decide I was big enough to see her in labor, big enough for her to ask me to take care of my brothers.
Momma’s pain stopped and she and Daddy retreated into their separate selves. They still moved as a unit though, leaning on each other, their steps matching, their heads bowed, into the taxi, and into an invisible world beyond the reach of our front porch light.
CHAPTER TWO
MY BABY SISTER WAS to be called Ida Bea, after my daddy’s older sister who died before I was born. “Y’all Aunt Ida Bea was special to y’all’s daddy when he was a little boy,” Momma said. “She helped his mama take care of him.”
Momma sat on the edge of the bed holding ten-day-old Baby Ida Bea so my brothers and I could get our first good look at her. Her tiny face was a smoothly swollen dark moon framed in the billowy whiteness of a baby blanket.
My imagination preened and stretched itself into the future where my baby sister would be big enough to play and be my ally in a household where I was outnumbered by three brothers. She would be the only one I would let climb my mulberry tree.
“Was I ever a baby like that?” Earl asked, staring, incredulous, at the white bundle in Momma’s arms.
“You sure were,” Momma answered.
“I mean little bitty like that,” Earl said, leaning in to point at the baby’s face.
Momma smiled and nodded.
“I never was,” Roy Anthony boasted, puffing out his narrow chest and bouncing up onto his tiptoes in front of Momma.
“Every one of y’all was,” Momma said and laughed. “Even I was once,” she added, grinning at Roy Anthony as he shook his head and rolled his eyes in disbelief. “We all start out babies. Then somebody got to love us and feed us and take care of us till we get big enough to take care of ourselves.”
Momma’s smile flattened and she dropped her gaze to the floor.
Baby Ida Bea yawned at us without opening her eyes and began to squirm in Momma’s arms.
“Now, now,” Momma said, pulling her attention back from wherever it had wandered off to. She rocked slowly from side to side, caressing the tiny cheek. Ida Bea opened her mouth and turned her head toward Momma’s hand. “I think, baby sister needs to eat,” Momma said.
“What you gonna feed her?” Earl wanted to know.
“What a dumb question,” Roy Anthony sang, putting the palm of his hand against his forehead and shaking his head. “Boy oh boy. Baby milk. Momma gonna give her baby milk right out from her body. You so dumb—”
“Roy,” Momma said. The warning in her voice