Men We Cherish by Brooke Stephens

Author:Brooke Stephens [Stephens, Brooke]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-307-81351-0
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2012-01-04T00:00:00+00:00

My Special Agent

Lillian G. Allen

I am eighty-seven years old. Spent most of my life working in some white woman’s kitchen, cooking and cleaning and doing somebody’s laundry. My husband left me and my daughter, Carolyn, when she was three years old, so I cleaned and saved enough until I could open my own beauty salon. All the years of working, and the best job I ever did was raising my grandson, Reese.

I see him infrequently now. When I do, I remember the mischievous little boy he once was. Speeding around my beauty salon on his tricycle, causing my patrons to hastily draw in their feet. One customer stopped coming. Said she loved my work but couldn’t stand that boy, that dog, that bicycle, and that noise.

His parents were high-school sweethearts. She was sixteen. Cute and petite, with an engaging smile and a reticent manner. I scrimped and saved and sent her away to Palmer Memorial. In those days it was a boarding school for children from good Negro families, down in North Carolina. I wanted to get her away from the neighborhood kids, who I considered unsuitable. Several of them had been arrested for shoplifting and always seemed to be in trouble. Possibly because of my long working hours, we had very little time together and we seldom had the mother-daughter talks I wanted to encourage. After her first year at Palmer she begged me not to be sent away again. She assured me that every parent had high aspirations to get their kids out of the shadow of bad influences, but the students at Palmer were no better than the ones in the Pittsburgh public schools. She convinced me that many of them at Palmer had already acquired some bad habits. They just hid them well from the faculty.

I remember Ronald, the little boyfriend she had all summer. He was seventeen. A shy boy wearing thick-rimmed glasses. My old Aunt Sally, who lived with me, tried to watch her but she was too old to keep up with a sixteen-year-old. Carolyn hid her pregnancy well. I sent her to a doctor when I first became suspicious. I learned later that she had begged him not to tell me. She knew she was too young. She knew I would insist on an abortion.

I wasn’t going to stand for it. There was no way I was going to allow my grandchild to be born out of wedlock. Talking time was over, but I wanted to yell at somebody. Before the Schenley High School teachers were aware of it, I marched my daughter into the principal’s office and told him of her pregnancy. I then called the boy’s mother, and told her there had to be a wedding. I said I would pick her up, and we would go to the license bureau together, since they were underage. The poor lady was very upset. She was also a beautician, but she worked out of her home. She had customers, she said. Told me she couldn’t possibly go at the hour I had arranged.

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