Silver Sparrow by Tayari Jones

Author:Tayari Jones [Jones, Tayari]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: Fiction, Family Life, African American, General
ISBN: 9781616201425
Google: baR1gyamrr4C
Amazon: B005UVQBSE
Publisher: Algonquin Books
Published: 2012-05-08T00:00:00+00:00

13

ONE HUNDRED PERCENT DRIVEN SNOW

“YOU NEVER KNOW,” my mother said to me. “You never know what means what.”

“True,” I said. I was just nine years old, give or take, but I had learned not to interrupt my mother when she was on a roll, especially not when she was talking to me in the deep voice she used with the women in the beauty shop. She didn’t talk this way to all of them, of course; different people got different treatment, just as some people had to pay for every clip of the shears and other people got their bangs straightened for free. On that day, in the car, she talked the way she did with the longtime customers, the ones who got their lips waxed on the house, the ones who called me “Miss Lady” and called my mother “Girl.”

“George Burns cheated on Gracie,” Mama said. “Can you believe that?”

I didn’t believe or not believe it, as I wasn’t absolutely sure who George Burns was. “The man who plays God in that movie?”

“Yes,” she said. “Him. He hasn’t always been old, you know. He was young and handsome and he was married to Gracie.”

“Oh,” I said. “I remember.” This was the key. If I talked too much, asking her to clarify, she would remember I was a kid and then she wouldn’t talk to me like this.

This was a long time ago, way back when Jimmy Carter made a fool of himself by telling Playboy magazine that he had committed adultery in his heart just by looking at pretty women and thinking the wrong kind of thoughts. My mama thought it was touching how devoted the president was to his wife, but my father got all discombobulated watching Johnny Carson crack jokes about it on TV. Daddy said, “He came home every night to Rosalynn, right? I tell you me, white folks look for things to worry about.”

“I don’t know,” my mama said. “I like the last part of what he said, about people not judging each other.”

When she said this, Daddy scooted closer to her on the couch, touching her cheek with his glass of gin-and-tonic. “You got something you don’t want to be judged for, girl?”

Mama laughed and pushed the glass away. “James, you are so crazy.”

“I’m just getting started,” he said.

MAYBE IT WAS because I spent half my life in my mother’s beauty shop, but it seemed that I knew quite a bit about marriage, even when I was just a little girl. It was probably a bad sign when I touched my kindergarten teacher on the knee when she looked unhappy and said, “Marriage is complicated.”

This was my mother’s favorite refrain. She said it at least daily to some woman dripping wet in the shampoo bowl. A shift in pitch flipped the meaning entirely, but the words were always the same. In the car that day on the way to the beautysupply store, talking about George and Gracie, she didn’t say “Marriage is complicated” in a between-the-lines way, like she did when she tried to talk over my head.

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