Caul Baby by Morgan Jerkins

Author:Morgan Jerkins [Morgan Jerkins]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Harper
Published: 2021-02-17T00:00:00+00:00

11

Hallow did not hear every word exchanged between Josephine and Landon, but she heard enough from her bedroom, where she eavesdropped. Usually, she couldn’t care less what Josephine and Landon did. In her eyes, she didn’t know what they were doing together. They weren’t considerably affectionate, and any conversations they had were stale and repetitive. Their joint effort of putting up a guise of a nuclear family in Maman’s brownstone was laughable. No one had to say anything. Hallow knew that he had other obligations that rivaled those at West 145th and Frederick Douglass Boulevard. She imagined him to be a criminal, but she knew he couldn’t lie through his teeth to pull off a misdemeanor. She thought he could be an in-demand businessman, but he never made mention of any meetings or coworkers. Nevertheless, she felt that if he was her father, and the three of them were a family, why couldn’t he be here all the time?

There was nothing on television that was compelling enough to overshadow the gravity of Josephine’s confessions. Hallow chuckled at the thought of Josephine making her way down the staircase, much less leaving out the front door. If Josephine wanted to, Hallow assumed, then she would’ve already done it. Besides, neither Josephine nor Landon was a match for Maman. They were flowers that leaned toward Maman’s blazing energy. Every time Maman entered a room where they were already present, they turned to acknowledge her arrival. Every time she spoke, they maintained strong eye contact with her out of respect and fear. In short, they weren’t going to do shit, and they were fooling themselves playing make-believe like children.

But Hallow could leave. For a few hours. She could grab her coat and walk around the corner with no destination in mind and smell that sweet, sweet air again. She was tired of regular cutting, the sound of the caul being severed from her skin, the parts held between Maman’s fingers and packaged away in wax paper and cute bows for some buyer whom she did not know. There was no proof of how much had been taken away from her body, and if she was not careful, she could easily fool herself into believing that these procedures never happened. They all transpired like fever dreams anyway: dim lighting, Maman and Josephine and maybe Landon around her, her lying down on some cool sheet, maybe new age music playing softly in the background. Maybe none of this was real. But something about them had to be real, or else the rest of Harlem would not have hated them so much.

Why hadn’t she refused to cut Iris? Why couldn’t she have just told Maman no and gone upstairs? She soon realized that she was just as afraid of Maman as Josephine was and that they were two peas in a pod—pathetic. But she was not like Josephine. If she were a mother, she would not speak of abandoning her family that nonchalantly. Either Hallow never fully

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