You and Cypress like to drive me crazy with all this experimental living. You girls need to stop chasing the coon by his tail. And I know you know what I’m talking about. I swear I am not sure if you would recognize a decent man, if I sent him out there Special Delivery. Politics and good looks do not a decent man make. Mark my words. You just come on home and we’ll straighten out whatever it is that’s crooked in your thinking. There’s lots to do to keep busy. And nobody around to talk foolish talk or experiment with.

Something can’t happen every day. You get up. You eat, go to work, come back, eat again, enjoy some leisure, and go back to bed. Now, that’s plenty for most folks. I keep asking myself where did I go wrong. Yet I know in my heart I’m not wrong. I’m right. The world’s going crazy and trying to take my children with it.

Okay. Now I’m through with all that. I love you very much. But you’re getting to be a grown woman and I know that too. You come back to Charleston and find the rest of yourself. (smile)

Love,
Mama

Chapter 23

The last time Aunt Haydee opened her mouth, she’d asked Indigo to play some rough blues on that fiddle. That was just before Ella Mae’s twins arrived. Indigo’d been rubbing Aunt Haydee’s hands on the porch by the scrub pines. The sea breeze left her face loved & clear. Aunt Haydee’s hands, the same ones delivered hundreds of brown little babies, yellow tykes, screaming black tiny ol’ things, those hands were aching, ugly, unmoving now. Indigo told Aunt Haydee her own stories: how the crocodile got his tail; where the rabbit learned to jump; how the wolf couldn’t be trusted. Aunt Haydee rocked in her chair. Now this chair had belonged to Aunt Carrie who was the mother to Aunt Susie Marie whose sister married that half-breed from Allendale, moved all the way to New York City & was killt in a barroom brawl where the Colored carried on.

Ella Mae’s delivery was quite ordinary. Everybody came out head first. Nothing was missing on either one. Johnny Orpheus held Ella Mae’s left leg, while Indigo raised the right so the babies had a free path. Ella Mae didn’t tear. She made a few yells that Christ would have heard in the other world, but Aunt Haydee kept on murmuring that Ella Mae was a good strong gal, strong gal, birthing two at a time like this.