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I spoke very quietly. “Mama, what’s wrong with you?”
“Ben, you better take your mama home now. Looks like she may have had a little touch o’ the grape.” He forced a laugh.
“My mama never drinks. She must be sick.”
“I’m afraid she is, son. Whiskey sick.”
Suddenly my mother’s knees buckled. She drooped over to one side and then fell to the floor with a heavy thud.
Sam Jenkins turned to the back of his store. “Henry, come up here! I got a lady passed out drunk on the floor.”
Chapter 9
FROM SEPARATE DIRECTIONS CAME two teenage boys. One was white, with red hair. The bigger one was black, as tall as he was skinny.
“Y’all help this boy take his mama out of here,” Sam Jenkins said.
The white boy leaned down to Mama and tried to lift her. She was small, but he couldn’t find the right angle to maneuver her into a standing position.
“Marcus, you gonna help me?”
“Mist’ Sam, I think this lady sick,” said the black kid.
“Nobody asked your opinion,” said Mr. Jenkins. “Just get her out of the store!”
They lifted my mother up and carried her out to the sidewalk, where they set her on a bench near the watering trough.
“Shit. She ain’t sick,” said the redheaded boy. “She’s drunk as a monkey.”
I was trying my best not to cry, but I couldn’t stop the tears blurring my eyes. I was helpless and small, and something was terribly, terribly wrong with my mother. I believed that she might die right there.
The white boy disappeared back into the store, shaking his mop of red hair in disgust.
Then Marcus spoke very softly to me. “Want to hep me carry her down to the doctor?”
I remember nothing of how we got my mother to Dr. Hunter’s house. I do remember hearing the doctor say, “Louellen isn’t drunk. This is apoplexy. She’s had a stroke, Ben. I’m so sorry.”
I burst into tears.
Later on, when I understood what the doctor’s words really meant, I wished Mama had been drunk. Everything in our lives was so different from then on. The next day she was in a wheelchair and looked twenty years older. Eventually she regained her ability to speak, but she left that chair only when she was lifted into the washtub or her bed.
She wrote a few poems about her condition—“A View from a Moving Chair” and “Words You May Not Understand” were the most famous ones—but she was always weak and often distracted.
To my surprise, she sometimes enjoyed talking about that day in Jenkins’s store. She would laugh at the idea that she had been mistaken for a drunk, but she always repeated the lesson she had learned that day: “Just remember one thing, Ben. That was a black boy who helped us. He was the only one who helped.”
I did as she instructed. I remembered it through grammar school, high school, college, and law school. I remembered it whenever colored people came to my office in Washington with worried faces and tears in their eyes, asking for my help.
But sometimes I couldn’t help them. The way I couldn’t help Grace Johnson.
I rested the neck of the banjo against my arm and began to pick out the notes of “Bethena,” the saddest rag Joplin ever wrote. Every note in that jaunty, quick tune is minor, every shading of the melody is dark.
For all that, it made me feel better—a little homesick, maybe, but what’s so wrong with that?
Chapter 10
I HEARD THE CLICK of the front door, then the happy, giggly sounds of Amelia and Alice hurrying inside.
This was followed by Meg’s icy voice.
