Thrown-away Child

snap of historical accusation in Violet Flagg’s voice, leavened by affectionate mockery. And in the case of the stricken white man she had invited to call her Mama, a special note of clemency. “Let’s hear some more of that Irish tongue 0* yours.”
    But I could think of nothing to say.
    “What do I got to do to make you speak, boy - Shake you ’til you go bald?”
    “I could talk, Mama,” I finally said. “But it doesn’t mean I know.”
    Violet smiled, as if I had passed some test she hoped I would pass. She slapped both her knees and said to Ruby, “The man talks honest as he does gorgeous. You done yourself all right, even if he is the po-lice.” Then she asked me, “How’d you like me to tell you the story about black folks in America, sweet land of liberty?”
    I said I would like that.
    “When you was a kid, you ever catch bugs in a jar on a summer night?”
    “Fireflies. In the summertime, up in the Catskills.“
    “White folks love doing that. Very seldom do you see black folks going after bugs. Neil, you ever give a little shake to your jar full of fireflies?”
    “Sometimes.”
    “Negroes is like bugs trapped in a jar. White folks holding on to the jar, of course. And oh La, white folks love shaking us up! Then sometimes one of us Negroes figures some way to get free. I mean free and clean out the jar. Then the white folks is left looking at all the other Negro bugs still trapped. And you know what, Neil?”
    “I can guess…”
    “Don’t mean you’d know.” Violet smiled kindly on me, her acknowledgment that we had established affinity. “The white folks holding the jars, they be giving Us the cold eye. You hear me?”
    “I do.”
    “They upset and confused about how many Negroes still trapped. And how we all angry-like. Buzzing around so bad we bashing and killing each other to get free, too. Now then, that’s one of God’s true lessons in American history. But you never hear about that in any schoolroom, did you?”
    “No, I never did. You mentioned cold eyes, though. That’s something I do understand.”
    “What you know about it?”
    “I know what it is to have your people’s grief buried deep. How sometimes you feel a crucifixion of the heart, which can’t help but show. And how people around you—by which I mean others —don’t trouble themselves to respect your grief; how they insist on believing the old gag about time healing all wounds. And how the others look at you sometimes...“
    “Go on, boy,” Mama said when I paused.
    “When I was young, I could tell how the others looked at my mother and me—”
    Ruby interrupted, explaining to Mama, “Neil’s mother raised him alone. She was an immigrant.” Mama nodded, and I continued.
    “The comfortable ones would see Mother and me, and turn away. Mother told me they were afraid of the hard memories in back of us. Afraid of life in mud cabins with no windows, afraid of gassy women with their bellies full of children and their sweaty husbands with no teeth left in their despairing heads. Mother, she’d say, ‘No matter it was them that reduced us to this lowest peasant state; no matter it was them consigned us to famine, forcing us into contorted thoughts—forcing us to flee our own land. No matter—’ ”
    “Say it!” Violet clapped her hands together, in a churchly way, as if encouraging the cascading locutions of a preacher.
    “And I would think, even as a boy, No matter that the Irish came to New York and learned the city ways, and had a few of our own sitting with the men in the fine suits. No matter! They saw Mother and me in our used clothes, purchased twice a year from the Holy Cross bazaars. They saw Mother’s tired and shapeless hair, a poor woman’s hair. They saw from her hands and her creased face that hard work was using her up. Myself they saw as only another red-faced neighborhood Mick with the possibility of becoming a donkey for the pier bosses so long as I didn’t show up drunk at the hiring hall. They looked at us both like it was our own fault...”
    “That’s all right now.” Mama daubed her eyes with a flowered hanky pulled from a sleeve. “All right, Neil.”
    “They looked at us with the cold eyes,” I said, finishing. “Cold as a ditch in the rain.”
    For a little while then, Violet was struck as silent as she had made me a few minutes earlier. I had moved her to tears, and there was something in my own eyes, and we were each of us contented by this. For a little