“He sounds nice,” I said.
“These women I be working with, they sixty, seventy years old, they been working a low-class job twenty or thirty years, barely making forty cent over minimum wage—and this man came along, he give them a two-dollar raise, and they treat him like—” She shook her head. “It’s weird. If you ain’t treat people the way they used to, they ain’t trust you.”
“They treat him how?” I guessed that this man was white.
“Like, there be another boss, she be calling them the N word, then they sit up straight and say, Yes, ma’am, yes, ma’am, yes, ma’am. That’s what these folks respect around here: They want someone to treat them like dogs, like that the only way to get them to bark right.”
“She just said…said the N word openly?”
“When I started there, she be planning a Christmas party and be asking them about music. One woman, about sixty-five, she say, ‘I got some music,’ and the manager say, ‘We don’t need no nigger music,’ and the woman say, ‘Yes, ma’am.’?”
Mary started laughing uncontrollably, a strange mirthless laughter.
“Oh, my God,” she hiccupped, finally getting a word out. “Every now and then the word come out of her mouth and people sit up straight. Ms. Rollins be her name; yes, Ms. Rollins.”
Like her husband, Mary had been born and raised in Helena. She was born in 1969, the same year that DeSoto was chartered to circumvent integration. Her mother had worked at the Helena hospital, and her dad worked at an electrical company on Highway 20 that closed not long after Mohawk shut down in 1979. After that, he started to drink more. He drank himself to death.
Mary met Patrick’s father at Eliza Miller, the same middle school that Patrick and my other students had attended before getting kicked out. She fell in love with him because he was fearless. The gym teacher was white and racist; he called students niggers. James wasn’t afraid. He talked back. “He’d cuss the teacher out; he ain’t afraid of nothing.” Mary shook her head, still admiring after all their years together. She made it to Central High, but she got pregnant and dropped out. “I got myself in deep trouble. We brought up during a time when you didn’t talk about sex. A young girl didn’t mess with a boy till she got married.” Her parents kicked her out of the house. Her mother died of kidney failure; she drank too many sodas, Mary said.
She kept working: at the casino, at Pizza Hut. “I like the night shift better. I take care of the children; I left them with Daddy at night, three or four times a week. It was nice. When he went to jail, he got three years or something. So I keep working.”
“You stuck by him,” I said.
“I tried to.”
“How come?”
“I don’t know. I guess we was always told do unto others what you want others do unto you. If I went to jail, I’d probably want him to wait on me.” She clasped her hands, unclasped them, scratched her head. “I loved him, I did. I still love him.”
At the age of thirty-four, she discovered she had diabetes. Her blood sugar was over 200. She tried to walk more and switched to sugar-free sodas. “Sometimes I don’t be speaking clear, I can’t remember too much of nothing,” she went on. “It’s because of my diabetes. I get stressed; I get seizures. I think it be all the stress I’m under. I talk to God all day, yes, I do. I ask him a lot of why questions.”
She looked up silently at the ceiling, as if she actually was talking to God. I waited for what seemed like a long minute.
“How…” I managed finally, “how did you feel after what happened with Patrick?”
“I ain’t sleep; I ain’t sleep for weeks. I keep wondering about that other boy and who his mom be. I be thinking about the two of them together. Then I ask God to put me in a room with her.” She smiled faintly. “And he did.”
She had asked around at work to see if anybody knew Marcus’s mom. “Someone told me her name, Ms. Carly. I looked her up in the phone book, and I just call her. She picked up the phone, just picked it up, and told me to come over. She lived two, four blocks down from where we live.”
Mary had been nervous. She worried it was a trap. “I thought something bad was gonna happen when I meet her, I swear to God I did. I thought a cousin or brother or somebody was gonna do something to me, I sure did.”
But Marcus’s mother answered the door and was alone.
“She looked kind of like one of my aunties: short, dark-skinned. She got this little smile on her face—it let me know everything. I thought she was gonna be mad with me, but she say she ain’t surprised that it happen. She said he used to jump her, his own mama, when he got to drinking. It was all crazy there; we be crying and hugging. She was more sorry about it than I was. I had more tears on me than she did.”
Mary touched her face in a remembering way. “When I say my prayers, I ask God to forgive me, to let me start a new day. I be praying all the time. I wake up in the morning, I ask God why this, why that. All day long I talk to him.”
“Do you feel like God responds?”
“He do, he do.”
She went quiet. I said eventually, “Did it surprise you, what happened that night?”
“Pat, what he did…it surprised everybody. He never do physical fighting, he just don’t do it. I believe…” She paused. “I believe he was trying to impress his father.”
Impress his father? I must have looked confused, because then she explained, “His dad love to see that type of stuff. His dad ain’t scared of nobody, you know. So I believe Pat didn’t know what to do but he didn’t want to back down. I try to tell him, ‘You were protecting your sister, not killing nobody.’?”
It dawned on me how different Patrick was from his father. The crippled leg had misled me. He had a much stronger street mentality than Patrick, embodying a male code fundamental to surviving: Meet a blow with a blow, defend your honor. A Stars student had told me: “My dad told me if someone lays his hand once, you walk away, but the second time, you got to hit back.”
Just because Patrick himself generally avoided fighting didn’t mean that the code didn’t rule him. His dad wanted him to be tougher, to fight back. Maybe Patrick was unused to fighting, to the point of responding with too much force. Had he grabbed the knife because he wasn’t skilled with his fists? There were two different stories about where the knife came from: The police wrote that he’d gone into the house, but he said it had already been sitting on the porch. I did not want to confront him. I didn’t know what to believe, but I did believe he had been scared.