So both Maggie and Loran are inclined as were their mothers and grandmothers before them, to circumspectly eye the "goings-on" to church and the "comings-out" from church of the new as well as the old folks. Their faces always have that "lifted eyebrow" look. They are slim as reeds themselves, (after several children between them), and quite often they poke fun at people for being fat. Or since they are extremely color-conscious, anyone darker than Hershey's darkest chocolate, becomes despicable in their eyes. It is very strange too, because by their own standards on skin color, they should be hating themselves and each other, and Maggie, her own child. Maybe it's all in her subconscious that has to do with why she named the child such an odd name. Still I like them, and have one each of their children in my first grade class. I can thank them, for because of their two, we now have one integrated first-grade class in our school. I often wish they both could display more interest in their six-year-olds. I imagine them sitting in each other's kitchens after shoo-ing their broods off to school in the morning; just sitting and trying to find something to gossip about. As I said before, when Maggie's little girl came to my class this fall, I had wondered again and had a hard time understanding why she had named that sweet child Sorrow. Sorrow fit my mothers' old adage, "The blacker the berry" and at the beginning of the school year she was one of my sweetest and happiest children. She was easy to teach, but often radiated various odors that were not too offensive. But there were days when Sorrow smelled alternately of bacon grease and ivory soap. Even so, gradually I grew interested in watching her each morning from my classroom window coming in to school with the other children. When she waited for Tommy, she blended into the backdrop of the small orange-blossomed shrubbery at the edge of the school's front walk. She skipped all the way up the street to the shrubs, and waited. It was usually a couple of minutes later that Loran's six-year-old, Tommy, would join her. Giggling and looking sideways at each other, up the school walk they'd come. Watching all my children in the morning coming to school brought back special memories. Later in the mornings, when I look out to them, I think they are my private flower garden, to tend and nourish for a year.' All the children in the class had at one time or another whispered softly in my ear that Sorrow's head, which hosted five kinky pigtails, tied tightly with pink yarn ribbons, smelled like lollipops. But it was simply Dixie Peach Pomade, which Maggie purchased at Norton's Drug and which gleamed from Sorrow's scalp that shown around the edges of the well plaited squares. Just before Christmas I noticed a change in Sorrow, a subtle sort of a change, one that I could not quite put my fingers on. I might have detected it earlier had it not been for a few problems at home of my own between Pres and me. The problem was a continuing one that started right after we married. We both finished college in the East the same year, and Pres followed me back to Ogden. We were married at Thurman A.M.E. Church on a sunny June day. It was ironical after the wedding ceremony when Pres and I turned to face the people and move down the aisle to the back of the church, that I saw Maggie and Loran sniggling and looking directly at Pres. It's true, Press black skin must have looked blacker still by contrast against his all-white tuxedo, and I hate to admit it, but I knew what they were thinking on my special day, since I knew the well-spring from which they drew their humor. But our problem didn't surface until later on that year when we moved five miles outside of town. There are not too many children out here where we live of any description and I'm not ready to alter that situation by having one. Pres says I'm too touchy on the race subject. But with all the progress that blacks have made and there's been a lot, I am still reluctant to have a child. "It's a matter of who we think we are!" Pres said. "What do you mean?" "Well" he leaned his long body forward on the couch, where we were sitting, and rested his elbows on his bony knees, "I mean, the only person you and I have to be concerned with straightening out, is ourselves, understand?" He looked at me quizzically. "Hell no, Pres, I don't understand. Everyone tells me now that because I'm an only child, I'm too selfish and to me, what you're saying is the most selfish thing of all how could we help anything or anybody? I shifted all one hundred pounds of my tiny frame and crossed my leg in the other direction. "And," I pouted, "what's all that high-fullutin' talk got to do with our having a child?" Pres looked disappointed that I'd not gotten his point, but I continued, "I'm not about to be responsible for anymore hurt or pain by deliberately bringing a child on earth to suffer no! If God wants black children, and red children, and crippled children to be born, then he'll have to look elsewhere, I'm not helpin'!!" I felt like crying. Pres reached over and took me in his arms, "Marcie, think of the Jews well, not just them everyone who has problems on this earth!" I broke away from him. "Then, let them have the babies!" "What about us?" Pres began to grope for the right thoughts to convince me "If if all black women felt like you do, we wouldn't have had the Duke Ellington's or" he stopped talking to follow my movements, I was deliberately uncrossing my legs and I started to get up. I had to fix dinner, so I headed for the kitchen, but turned to him, "O.K. Gaylord Preston Jackson, so I love you and this color thing is an insane hangup that I really am tired of discussing!" But he followed me still talking, and picked up where he'd just left off. "Yeh, and we, you and I have good jobs here." "It's the quota system, affirmative action." I really was tired of it all by now. "So?" Pres insisted "so there's some good for us in the quota system." He thought for a moment, not ready to yield to defeat, "Marcie, IT IS NOT THE QUOTA SYSTEM! You and I are damn good at what we do, and you and I, and they, KNOW IT!" I was a little startled with the vehemence of his words; he was really wound up. 6 "God, Marcie, if white people only knew how deliberate our thoughts are about the racial considerations for our children, they'd never believe it!" "Let's say, SOME of us are deliberate about thoughts for our children. Sometimes, I wonder what makes that Maggie's head work!" I was thinking of Sorrow again. And Pres exploded, again. "What? Maggie? What in the hell has She got to do with our deciding to have a child?" "A whole lot! It's people like her that rear kids to hate themselves, hate their color it rubs off on everyone, and its that kind of self hate that has caused a lot of our problems!" Pres looked disappointed with my long speech. "it's more complex than that Mars-ss even Maggie isn't deliberately trying to be color-conscious." Pres suddenly quieted down and said with finality, "O.K., O.K., so this color thing is like an infectious disease, it's been with us for an eternity, and none of us escape it. Not one of us." It wasn't long after our silent dinner that we went to bed, and Pres zonked out to leave me thinkin about Duke Ellington's home town of Washington D.C the university we'd attended there how it was founded by white slave owners for their bastard children, begotten in some slave's shack by a union solemnized only by the agonized expression on the violated slave woman's face and the recitation of all this I'd heard in the "required" history class I'd taken there which took me back to my childhood, and Mrs. Bletson's Sunday School class on the history of the black church then, I fell asleep. So now, two months after the Christmas holidays, I'm pregnant. Press exhortation worked. But my mother's had not. She had often said to me, "Marcie, you have to think of the children when you marry! I knew she too had been affected by this color insanity thing, for I knew what she really meant... don't marry a very dark black man. It was insanity, because Mama was very dark herself and I now realized that she had hated her own darkness, just like Maggie and Loran hated theirs. But, it was not her fault; she'd been affected by the conditioning of centuries of feelings, passed to her for imitating and the meanings of words for Mama, like blackmailed, and blackballed carried the negative connotation over for her to people without her realizing it. The meanings of words had, somehow in her mind, got mixed up for what people are. So, the most convincing argument Pres had made during the holidays took me back to Washington and Howard University. It was there that I changed. When I had arrived I had at first felt that looking like a mulatto to the students there had a distinct advantage. Because of it I had made the elite sorority and was glad of it at the time. Though God surely knows that I took my coloring only after my father whose own grandmother was a red-headed slave child. But I learned there at Howard University that being black could mean soft as black velvet, soothing as a dim light, comfortable and familiar as an old friend to chat with, and learning all this changed me. It was Pres who I met there that taught me this, he had said that to merely choose to refer to oneself as "black" instead of Negro meant that by freedom of choice and one's own definitions, the word "black" was christened pristine and pure. Yes, it's two months after the holidays and I'd be deliriously happy about being pregnant if I didn't have to think about what happened to Sorrow yesterday. I called her mother Maggie to come to school, after I talked to the little white child that had called Sorrow a nigger. A black nigger she'd called her, to be exact. She said she didn't mean it. She had heard the word somewhere, she'd forgotten, but she said she'd heard the word and since she was afraid of Sorrow, it seemed to fit her. I knew she was sorry, because she cried so hard we used up six Kleenex's getting the mucous stopped. I hugged her and she looked at me like her momentary jig-saw world had come suddenly back together, not seeming to connect my Negroidness with Sorrow, in any way. The session with Sorrow was just as "teary," as we sat together later that day on the little chairs in the cloakroom. "Am I a nigger Mrs. Jackson?" she'd asked. I had tried to smile as I tugged to straighten her dress collar under her coat. The tears which ran down her smudged, ashy, little face in rivulets, splashed onto my wrist, and it was Kleenex time again. "Mrs. Jackson, am I a nigger?" "This is a strange world, sometimes Sorrow." "But but," she sobbed, "Am I?" "Sorrow, I don't know what a nigger is it's it is just a word." "It's something that means me, I'm black!" "No, I think it is something that means afraid, so afraid!" "Afraid?" "Yes, the little girl who called you a nigger is afraid." "How cum?" "She's afraid of you because someone told her to be." Sorrow's face crumpled and she started sobbing again. I wish I could remember the next thing I said while we were sitting there that caused her flow of tears to cease. She put her chubby arms around my neck and placed her cheek to mine with the shy hug that slightly wet my cheek. As I followed her half skipping walk to the front door of the school where Maggie was waiting for us, Sorrow turned to say goodbye. It was a silent, private goodbye between just us. Only her wide eyes spoke and they were full of grateful devotion, and for the moment I was grateful too. But when I got home I couldn't get it all off my mind. When I told Pres about it that night, he seemed to make sense of the whole incident for the first time. "It's like walking on a wide smooth road barefoot, Marcie" He was on the edge of the couch again, with his elbows on his knees, "the greater portion of the road is O.K., just like people." "There you go again, Pres, please get to the point." "That is the point, the majority of people are like that smooth road, O.K.? But then there's one jagged rock on all of that smooth road that cuts into your bare feet. And it hurts." "Yes, but how does that fit Sorrow?" "Sorrow's color makes her vulnerable, like bare-footedness, there for anyone to take a poke at." Pres 7