Silver Sparrow by Tayari Jones

stutter raised in him so badly, he couldn’t even get out the beginning of his response. My mother reminded him how much he wanted a baby. Laverne had been lying beneath him for a ful decade, but she had not been able to give him what he most wanted. It had taken my mother only a few months. This baby was determined to be born, conceived despite al their caution. My mother told him that I was destiny.
    At last he said, “You’re giving me a son.”
    James sat on the porch swing at the rooming house and thought it over. She could see him processing it, going over it al in his head. He would think a while, and then look over at her — not at her face, but at her stomach, looking at me. Mother admits to feeling a little jealous. Al he was thinking was that he could final y get to be a daddy, that he was going to get himself a junior. He and Laverne had had a baby boy a long time ago, when they first got married. The baby was born feetfirst and didn’t even live long enough to take his first breath. James rocked on the porch swing, thinking that here came his second chance.
    While he was celebrating the idea that he could final y be a daddy, saying that he couldn’t wait to tel his brother, my mother popped the question.
    She said it in a playful tone, like she was inviting him out for an ice-cream soda. “James,” she said, “let’s go get married. Make an honest woman out of me.”
    Just moments earlier, he had been al motion, but now it was like somebody had pumped him through with embalming fluid. Final y he came out and said, “I am not leaving Laverne.”
    Mother knew he was serious because he cal ed his wife by her name. It made her remember her own father. When she had left Clarence, she knew her father was through with her because he said, “You’re no better than Flora.”
    When James said he wasn’t going to leave Laverne, Mother tried to act like he had misunderstood her, like she hadn’t been suggesting that they run away together and live life like normal people, giving me a chance at ordinary life.
    “Who said anything about leaving anybody? Marry me, too. Let’s drive to Birmingham, get married in Alabama.” Of course she knew the marriage wouldn’t be legal, but it would be something, better than nothing. Even an il egal marriage would save me from being a bastard. This was al she was thinking. Mother says it was Wil ie Mae who pointed out that getting him to marry her, making him a bigamist, a criminal, would give her something to have up her sleeve. But when Mother popped the question, she wasn’t angling. She was just thinking about love and about me.
    He sat, staring at her from the neck down, and he tried to say something. The stammer was real y bad back then. He bucked around like he was having a seizure or something and then he said, “For once in my life, I want to marry a woman who isn’t already pregnant.”
    My mother laughed at him. She couldn’t help herself. After al they had shared, he wanted to get al prissy, like he didn’t get to be a June bride.
    She said, “Wel , you need to stop lying down with women you are not married to.”
    The entire conversation took place on the screened-in porch of the rooming house. She should have taken him somewhere more private, but where did she have to go?
    When he walked away, al the other girls watched from the windows. She could see them lifting corners of the shades and looking out.
    Mother says it was like a slap in the face, but I don’t correct her. Abandonment doesn’t have the sharp but dissipating sting of a slap. It’s like a punch to the gut, bruising your skin and driving the precious air from your body.
    After my father drove away, Wil ie Mae walked out onto the porch and sat beside Mother on the swing. Mother knew then how disadvantaged her situation was, pregnant and by herself. And she knew how unequal life was that she was the one who got caught. James returned to his two-story house with a heavy heart, to be sure. My