“I’ll ask Baby.” Janie looked at Baby and Baby wobbled his hands and drooled some. She said, “It’s okay.”
Miss Kew said, “Gerard, I asked you a question.”
“Keep your pants on,” I said. “I got to find out, don’t I? Yes, if that’s what you want, we’ll listen to Miriam, too.”
Miss Kew turned to Miriam. “You hear that, Mriam?”
Miriam looked at Miss Kew and at us and shook her head. Then she held out her hands a bit to Bonnie and Beanie.
They went right to her. Each one took hold of a hand. They looked up at her and grinned. They were probably planning some sort of hellishness, but I guess they looked sort of cute. Miriam’s mouth twitched and I thought for a second she was going to look human. She said, “All right, Mss Kew.”
Mss Kew walked over and handed her the baby and she started upstairs with him. Mss Kew herded us along after Miriam. We all went upstairs.
They wait to work on us then and for three years they never stopped.
“That was hell,” I said to Stern.
“They had their work cut out.”
“Yeah, I s’pose they did. So did we. Look, we were going to do exactly what Lone said. Nothing on earth could of stopped us from doing it. We were tied and bound to doing every last little thing Miss Kew said to do. But she and Miriam never seemed to understand that. I guess they felt they had to push every inch of the way. All they had to do was make us understand what they wanted, and we’d of done it. That’s okay when it’s something like telling me not to climb into bed with Janie.
“Miss Kew raised holy hell over that. You’d of thought I’d robbed the Crown Jewels, the way she acted. But when it’s something like, ‘You must behave like little ladies and gentlemen,’ it just doesn’t mean a thing. And two out of three orders she gave us were like that. ‘Ah-ah!’ she’d say. ‘Language, language!’ For the longest time I didn’t dig that at all. I finally asked her what the hell she meant, and then she finally came out with it. But you see what I mean.”
“I certainly do,” Stern said. “Did it get easier as time went on?”
“We only had real trouble twice, once about the twins and once about Baby. That one was real bad.”
“What happened?”
“About the twins? Well, when we’d been there about a week or so we began to notice something that sort of stunk. Janie and me, I mean. We began to notice that we almost never got to see Bonnie and Beanie. It was like that house was two houses, one part for Miss Kew and Janie and me, and the other part for Miriam and the twins. I guess we’d have noticed it sooner if things hadn’t been such a hassle at first, getting us into new clothes and making us sleep all the time at night, and all that. But here was the thing: We’d all get turned out in the side yard to play, and then along comes lunch, and the twins got herded off to eat with Miriam while we ate with Miss Kew. So Janie said,‘Why don’t the twins eat with us?’
“ ‘Miriam’s taking care of them, dear,’ Miss Kew says.
“Janie looked at her with those eyes. ‘I know that. Let ’em eat here and I’ll take care of ’em.’
“Miss Kew’s mouth got all tight again and she said, ‘They’re little colored girls, Jane. Now eat your lunch.’
“But that didn’t explain anything to Janie or me, either. I said, ‘I want ’em to eat with us. Lone said we should stay together.’
“ ‘But you are together,’ she says. “We all live in the same house. We all eat the same food. Now let us not discuss the matter.’
“I looked at Janie and she looked at me, and she said, ‘So why can’t we all do this livin’ and eatin’ right here?’
“Miss Kew put down her fork and looked hard. ‘I have explained it to you and I have said that there will be no further discussion.’
“Well, I thought that was real nowhere. So I just rocked back my head and bellowed, ‘Bonnie! Beanie!’ And, bing, there they were.
“So all hell broke loose. Miss Kew ordered them out and they wouldn’t go, and Miriam come steaming in with their clothes, and she couldn’t catch them, and Miss Kew got to honking at them and finally at me. She said this was too much. Well, maybe she had had a hard week, but so had we. So Miss Kew ordered us to leave.
“I went and got Baby and started out, and along came Janie and the twins. Miss Kew waited till we were all out the door and next thing you know she ran out after us. She passed us and got in front of me and made me stop. So we all stopped.
“ ‘Is this how you follow Lone’s wishes?’ she asked.
“I told her yes. She said she understood Lone wanted us to stay with her. And I said, ‘Yeah, but he wanted us to stay together more.’
“She said come back in, we’d have a talk. Jane asked Baby and Baby said okay, so we went back. We had a compromise. We didn’t eat in the dining room no more. There was a side porch, a sort of verandah thing with glass windows, with a door to the dining room and a door to the kitchen, and we all ate out there after that. Miss Kew ate by herself.
“But something funny happened because of that whole cockeyed hassle.”
“What was that?” Stern asked me.
I laughed. “Miriam. She looked and sounded like always, but she started slipping us cookies between meals. You know, it took me years to figure out what all that was about. I mean it. From what I’ve learned about people, there seems to be two armies fightin’ about race. One’s fightin’ to keep ’em apart, and one’s fightin’ to get ’em together. But I don’t see why both sides are so worried about it! Why don’t they just forget it?”
“They can’t. You see, Gerry, it’s necessary for people to believe they are superior in some fashion. You and Lone and the kids—you were a pretty tight unit. Didn’t you feel you were a little better than all of the rest of the world?”
“Better? How could we be better?”
“Different, then.”
“Well, I suppose so, but we didn’t think about it. Different, yes. Better, no.”
“You’re a unique case,” Stern said. “Now go on and tell me about the other trouble you had. About Baby.”
“Baby. Yeah. Well, that was a couple of months after we moved to Miss Kew’s. Things were already getting real smooth, even then. We’d learned all the ‘yes, ma’am, no, ma’am’ routines by then and she’d got us catching up with school—regular periods morning and afternoons, five days a week. Janie had long ago quit taking care of Baby, and the twins walked to wherever they went. That was funny. They could pop from one place to another right in front of Miss Kew’s eyes and she wouldn’t believe what she saw. She was too upset about them suddenly showing up bare. They quit doing it and she was happy about it. She was happy about a lot of things. It had been years since she’d seen anybody—years. She’d even had the meters put outside the house so no one would ever have to come in. But with us there, she began to liven up. She quit wearing those old-lady dresses and began to look halfway human. She ate with us sometimes, even.
“But one fine day I woke up feeling real weird. It was like somebody had stolen something from me when I was asleep, only I didn’t know what. I crawled out of my window and along the ledge into Janie’s room, which I wasn’t supposed to do. She was in bed. I went and woke her up. I can still see her eyes, the way they opened a little slit, still asleep, and then popped up wide. I didn’t have to tell her something was wrong. She knew, and she knew what it was.
“ ‘Baby’s gone!’ she said.
