e was only fifteen at the time. She was barefoot in the picture, and I thought she looked fresh and innocent and as lovely as anything else nature had to offer.
Momma and Jimmy had the same shimmering black hair and dark eyes. They both had bronze complexions with beautiful white teeth that allowed them ivory smiles. Daddy had dark brown hair, but mine was blond. And I had freckles over the tops of my cheeks. No one else in my family had freckles.
"What about that rake and shovel we bought for the garden?" Jimmy asked, careful not to let even a twinkle of hope show in his eyes.
"We ain't got the room," Daddy snapped.
Poor Jimmy, I thought. Momma said he was born all crunched up as tightly as a fist, his eyes sewn shut. She said she gave birth to Jimmy on a farm in Maryland. They had just arrived there and gone knocking on the door, hoping to find some work, when her labor began.
They told me I had been born on the road, too. They had hoped to have me born in a hospital, but they were forced to leave one town and start out for another where Daddy had already secured new employment. They left late in the afternoon one day and traveled all that day and that night.
"We were between nowhere and no place, and all of a sudden you wanted to come into this world," Momma told me. "Your daddy pulled the truck over and said, 'Here we go again, Sally Jean.' I crawled onto the truck bed where we had an old mattress, and as the sun came up, you entered this world. I remember how the birds were singing.
"I was looking at a bird as you were coming into this world, Dawn. That's why you sing so pretty," Momma said. "Your grandmomma always said whatever a woman looked at just before, during, or right after giving birth, that's what characteristics the child would have. The worst thing was to have a mouse or a rat in the house when a woman was pregnant."
"What would happen, Momma?" I asked, filled with wonder.
"The child would be sneaky, cowardly."
I sat back amazed when she told me all this. Momma had inherited so much wisdom. It made me wonder and wonder about our family, a family we had never seen. I wanted to know so much more, but it was difficult to get Momma and Daddy to talk about their early lives. I suppose that was because so much of it was painful and hard.
We knew they were both brought up on small farms in Georgia, where their people eked out poor livings from small patches of land. They had both come from big families that lived in rundown farmhouses. There just wasn't any room in either household for a newly married, very young couple with a pregnant wife, so they began what would be our family's history of traveling, traveling that had not yet ended. We were on our way again.
Momma and I filled a carton with those kitchen-wares she wanted to take along and then gave it to Daddy to load in the car. When she was finished, she put her arm around my shoulders, and we both took one last look at the humble little kitchen.
Jimmy was standing in the doorway, watching. His eyes turned from pools of sadness to coal-black pools of anger when Daddy came in to hurry us along. Jimmy blamed him for our gypsy life. I wondered sometimes if maybe he wasn't right. Often Daddy seemed different from other men—more fidgety, more nervous. I would never say it, but I hated it whenever he stopped off at a bar on his way home front work. He would usually come home in a sulk and stand by the windows watching as if he were expecting something terrible. None of us could talk to him when he was in one of those moods. He was like that now.
"Better get going," he said, standing in the doorway, his eyes turning even colder as they rested for a second on me.
For a moment I was stunned. Why had Daddy given me such a cold look? It was almost as if he blamed me for our having to leave.
As soon as the thought entered my mind, I chased it away. I was being silly! Daddy would never blame me for anything. He loved me. He was just mad because Momma and I were being so slow and dawdling, instead of hurrying out the door. As if reading my mind, Momma suddenly spoke.
"Right," she said quickly. Momma and I started for the door, for we had all learned from hard experience that Daddy was unpredictable when his voice turned so tight with anger. Neither one of us wanted to invoke his wrath. We turned back once and then closed the door behind us, just like we had closed dozens of doors before.
There were few stars out. I didn't like nights without stars. On those nights shadows seemed so much darker and longer to me. Tonight was one of those nights—cold, dark, all the windows in houses around us black. The wind carried a piece of paper through the street, and off in the distance a dog howled. Then I heard a siren. Somewhere in the night someone was in trouble, I thought, some poor person was being carried off to the hospital, or maybe the police were chasing a criminal.
"Let's move along," Daddy ordered and sped up as if they were chasing us.
Jimmy and I squeezed ourselves into the backseat with our cartons and suitcases.
"Where we going this time?" Jimmy demanded without disguising his displeasure.
"Richmond," Momma said.
"Richmond!" we both said. We had been every-where in Virginia, it seemed, but Richmond.
"Yep. Your daddy's got a job in a garage there, and I'm sure I can land me a chambermaid job in one of the motels."
"Richmond," Jimmy muttered under his breath. Big cities still frightened both of us.
As we drove away from Granville and the darkness fell around us, our sleepiness returned. Jimmy and I closed our eyes and fell asleep against each other as we had done so many times before.
Daddy had been planning our new move for a little while because he had already found us a place to live. Daddy often did things quietly and then announced them to us.
Because the rents in the city were so much higher, we could afford only a one-bedroom apartment, so Jimmy and I still had to share a room. And the sofa bed! It was barely big enough for the two of us. I knew that sometimes he awoke before me but didn't move because my arm was on him and he didn't want to wake me and embarrass me about it. And there were those times he touched me accidentally where he wasn't supposed to. The blood would rush to his face, and he would leap off the bed as if it had started to burn. He wouldn't say anything to acknowledge he had touched me, and I wouldn't mention it.
It was usually like that. Jimmy and I simply ignored things that would embarrass other teenage boys and girls forced to live in such close quarters, but I couldn't help sitting by and dreaming longingly for the same wonderful privacy most of my girlfriends enjoyed, especially when they described how they could close their doors and gossip on their own phones or write love notes without anyone in their families knowing a thing about it. I was even afraid to keep a diary because everyone would be looking over my shoulder.