“Take care of yourself. Maybe I’ll get to see you someday. I hope I do. I hope I see you again.”

“There’s an organization in Alexandria you might want to get in touch with, Rhoda. The American Friends Service Committee. They’re doing studies to start a tutoring program for poor children. If you have some time on your hands, call them up. They’ll find work for you to do.”

“Oh, I will. Thanks for telling me that. Well, I’d better hang up. Malcolm’s having a fit. He wants to go.”

“Where will you spend the night?”

“I have to go. I really have to go. He’s getting mad.” I hung up the phone and walked back over to the station wagon and got in and tried to quiet the boys down and my husband revved up the motor and pulled out onto the highway and we continued on our way.

At twelve the next afternoon we drove up into the yard of our new house, a small brick duplex across the street from an apartment development. It was clean and the walls were painted white and although the rooms were small they would do. What furniture Malcolm had managed to salvage from the apartment in Atlanta was arranged haphazardly around the room. A moving van was coming that afternoon from Dunleith with the baby beds and furniture from my room. It was not going to be much compared to the life I had been leading but it would do. It would do as soon as I found someone to take care of the babies. It wasn’t that I didn’t like them or resented them coming unbidden into the world. I just didn’t like to take care of them. It bored me to take care of small children because it’s a boring job. Nature never intended a young woman to be alone in a house with small children. In any simple natural culture women gather in the daytime in groups and the older women care for the children and the younger women find work to do. Nowhere in nature is there anything like the boring life I was fixing to lead in Alexandria, Louisiana. Of course, by the time I had been there forty-eight hours I had found Klane Marengo and for forty dollars a week she was going to come at breakfast and stay until supper and take my boring work off my hands. Daddy had put two thousand dollars into a checking account for me to use for emergencies. The way I figured it, at forty dollars a week I could keep the wolf of motherhood from my door for at least six months. If that wasn’t an emergency, I didn’t know what one was.

“How do you like it?” Malcolm asked. He was standing in the middle of the half-empty living room holding Little Malcolm in his arms.