“Get me some water,” I screamed. “Get out of here. He does not look like a monkey. He’s a beautiful baby. I hate you. Get out of here. Don’t you ever touch me or talk to me again.”

A week later they released me from the hospital and I packed up my babies and went home to Dunleith to live. “I can’t stand him,” I told my mother. “He doesn’t love me. He won’t help me. All he does is get me pregnant. He’s going to kill me if I stay with him.”

“Come on home,” Daddy told me. “We’ll take care of you. Leave that little bastard. I never did like the little son-of-a-bitch anyway.”

* * *

Now I was going to be home for a long time. I would be a child again, in my mother’s house with maids taking care of my babies. Meanwhile, in Atlanta, Charles William was building houses while he finished school and Irise had a job working for the chancellor of Georgia Tech. May Garth was also in Atlanta now. She was living in a black neighborhood and going out with a Justice Department lawyer. The only thing I had left in common with them was that we all still loved to drink. Irise and Charles William came home frequently to visit their parents and those visits became the high points of my life.

“Look at this, listen to this, did you hear about this?” They came in from Atlanta bringing records, books, magazines from Italy, surreal cartoons from France, ideas, gossip, excitement. I began to live for their visits. The rest of my mind was at bay, trapped, shut down, on hold.

“Come play with your babies,” my mother was always saying to me. “Come take them for a walk, Rhoda. They want you. You should spend more time with them.” And I would dutifully go into their room and open books and read to them out loud sometimes for hours. I liked to look at them and I could read to them or push them in their strollers but I could not stand to be alone with them. My mind could not tolerate their incessant demands. I wanted to be in Atlanta dancing with my friends, reading, thinking, learning, expanding into the world. Instead, I was rolled in the hot sweet taffy clouds of family. On one side my mother and my father and their suffocating cloying love. On the other my wild demanding little boys. Sometimes in the fall afternoons I would put on a skirt and sweater and saddle oxfords and walk the streets of Dunleith trying to be happy, trying to think, trying to understand, but there was nothing to understand. I was bored to death, that was all. Deeply, dangerously, tragically bored.

Part Five

CRY SORROW, SORROW, SORROW, YET LET GOOD PREVAIL

Chapter

24