Mulberry. Paulette Boudreaux
switch she snapped from a shrub in our backyard.
“Crazy things go on deep in these Quarters, and I don’t want you back there,” she yelled at me when she stopped stinging my legs with the switch. She threatened to give me a worse beating if I ever went beyond house 5 again.
I had cried and sulked for hours afterward. Although the places where that switch had licked my skin did sting for a while, that wasn’t the primary source of my long, drawn-out sadness. What had hurt the most was the shock of being hit by my mother and seeing an unfamiliar anger in her eyes that was directed at me. From that I surmised that what went on deep in the Quarters must be truly horrible. I imagined that fairytale monsters like goblins, trolls, and witches must live in the unseen reaches of my neighborhood. For Esther, my imagination, however vivid, wasn’t enough to satisfy her curiosity.
“What your mama don’t know can’t hurt her,” Esther teased. “Besides, you grown enough to take care of yourself. You almost as grown as me, and I don’t need nobody to take care of me.”
For some time I had been growing less interested in learning the kinds of things Momma wanted to teach me—how to sew, how to braid my own hair, how to properly season a pot of beans, how to iron a blouse. But my belief in her power over me remained intact. I was still afraid to lie to her. “Don’t even try lying to me, ’cause you can’t get nothing by me,” she would say. I was sure she would spot a lie and swat it from the air and I would have hell to pay.
But that year as June wound down into July, Esther was becoming my new authority, and she was a good liar, good enough for her lies to sail right pass Momma. Sometimes she concocted elaborate stories to tell my mother about how we spent our time when we were out of her sight. Momma listened, busy with whatever housework she was doing. Sometimes she paused in the middle of one of Esther’s tales and asked, “Really?”
“Yes ma’am,” Esther answered, and kept on with her story. As the summer wore on, Momma stopped asking how Esther and I had spent our time.
So whenever Esther suggested it, I followed her as she meandered through the woods to come out at a different part of the Quarters. We were exploring house by house surreptitiously, seeing what we could see, hearing what we could hear. Before the summer was over we had seen nearly every house in the Quarters more than once. What we found sometimes shocked and appalled me.
We found an old woman who kept a pet monkey locked away in her house. We saw it playing in her front window. Sometimes it got out and attacked children. It jumped on their heads and scratched their faces and necks. We even encountered kids who proudly showed their scars to prove the stories. There were several houses that I now know were bootleg whiskey joints. At the time I just thought of them as music houses. There was always loud music flowing out of those places and grinning, preoccupied grown-ups with glasses of “water” on the porches. Once, I saw my classmate Percy Blakely, shirtless and barefoot, in the yard in front of one of those houses. When he saw me, he ran onto the porch and disappeared inside.
“There goes Percy from my class,” I told Esther. She went to the porch and asked an old woman sitting with a glass of clear liquid in her hand if a boy named Percy lived there.
“Child, git on ’way from here,” she told Esther. “Y’all don’t need to know nothing ’bout nothing or nobody up in this house.”
Esther turned and grinned at me where I stood in the road. She shrugged, a magnificent gesture with her arms thrown out from her sides, palms skyward. “She say Percy don’t live here.”
“I ain’t said nothing, but get out of my yard, you little hard-headed sow. You come round here again I’m going to take a switch to those skinny little legs of yours. Now gone.”
Esther acted as if she hadn’t heard. She flung her arms out and danced wildly around in the yard. I stayed where I was, looking on shyly, until the woman, mean enough to be somebody’s mother, stood and moved to the top of the steps. “Y’all get on ’way from here before I tell y’all’s mama.”
Esther stuck her tongue out, then turned and ran away laughing.
Another time when we were exploring the Quarters, there was the old man who offered us a dollar apiece if we would come see what he had inside his pants. “It won’t bite you,” he assured us. “It likes little girls. You don’t even have to touch it if you don’t want to.” It was the quick tug on my arm from Esther and the alarmed look on her face that made me turn and run. I imagined that I felt the heat of the old man’s breath on the back of my legs as Esther and I ran away. We ran all the way to my mulberry tree and climbed as high as we could go and lolled about on the branches like cats until we caught our breath. Esther confided to me that she had already seen what was inside men’s pants.
“I’ve seen my brothers’ weenies,” I said, confident and proud.
“It’s not the same thing at all. Men’s things are ten times as big, and if you touch them they get even bigger. They make babies too,” she added, as a final cause for condemnation.
This explained why my mother kept swelling up big and round before she would go to the hospital and come home with a baby. It was my father who kept putting the babies there. I had asked Momma once how it happened, and she had told me, her only girl child, that it was none of my business.
Esther telling me this new information about where the baby inside my mother came from felt hateful and mean to me. But Esther wasn’t even thinking of me when she said it. Her eyes had a faraway, glazed-over look she got sometimes, like she was seeing something I couldn’t see. The sudden distance between us filled me with sadness, and I could smell the end of summer and see the leaves of my mulberry tree changing color.
“Last one out of the tree is a rotten egg,” I shouted and started scurrying from the tree like a squirrel. I couldn’t stand for her to think about things that didn’t involve me, and I hated the idea of fall. That meant school, and Esther going away.
“I’m going to my mother’s house,” Esther said with her back to me one day as we hunted along the edge of the creek for fresh blackberries. Her grandma had promised to make us a pie if we brought back enough in the syrup buckets she gave us. Mine was half-full already.
“I thought you were staying until the end of summer.” I tried to keep the panic from showing by practicing the sort of busy detachment that she was good at. I parted the weeds with the end of my stick, pretending to be absorbed in the hunt for berries.
“I am. I’m only going to her house for two nights.”
“Seems silly to go home and then come back.”
“I don’t live with my mama, stupid.” She stopped and looked at me like I was some kind of moron. “I live with my Aunt Helen up in Meridian. My mama lives right here in Blossom.”
I don’t know why I didn’t know that, but I didn’t. The idea of a girl not living with her mother had never occurred to me. I knew one girl at school, Collette Willis, who didn’t live with her mother. She lived with her grandma, but her mother was dead. This was different.
“Why don’t you live with your mother?”
Esther stopped her hunt for a moment and looked at me. She dragged her fingertips across her eyebrows and brought them to rest in the baby hairs at the base of her skull.
“When I was little I didn’t want to,” she said. “I liked my Aunt Helen better. I don’t remember why. My mama loved me, but I loved my auntie.”
I had watched her lie to my mother and to her grandma about all sorts of things, and I had noted her habit of fingering her eyebrows or pulling at the little hairs at the back of her neck when she was telling a lie. So I knew she was lying to me, but I couldn’t challenge her. I thought I might lose something important if I shattered the image I had of her. After all, I was trying to model myself after her. I imitated her walk, pointing my toes inward toward each other to gain the feel of her slightly bowlegged,