Caul Baby by Morgan Jerkins (read any book .TXT) 📕

to see if you would do it: to get in line and do whatever you’re told. And unfortunately, I was right all along. Pity. Thought you might be different.” Iris raised the blunt to her lips, and Hallow grabbed her wrist.

“What do you mean by that?”

Iris shook her wrist free. “Exactly what I said. Don’t matter, though. You’re supposed to be what you’re supposed to be.”

Hallow took the blunt from her hands and pulled long until Iris had to stomp on her feet for her to stop. Hallow blew a long chain from her mouth without coughing into Iris’s face.

“I have a question for you.”

“What?”

“You talk to spirits, don’t you?”

“You ask as if it’s voluntary.”

“Do you see my mother?”

Iris squinted and asked, “What are you talking about, girl? You high. You are really, really high.”

“Is Josephine really my mother, Iris?”

“No. Are you happy? No. But she’s as much a mother as you’re going to get, so what’s your problem?”

“Where is my mother? Can you summon her? Is she in here? Have you ever seen her?”

“No.”

“No to what?”

“No to all.”

“Why not?”

“You’re a smart girl. Guess.”

Hallow stared into Iris’s eyes and watched her become more foreign than they ever had. She looked around the room, hyperventilating, and the walls were caving in on them both. Unsure if this was paranoia or an epiphany, Hallow crawled to the floor in the fetal position and placed a hand over each ear. This brownstone became far too small now that there was something else of her beyond those four walls. There was someone existing somewhere out there. Here. On earth right now. There was someone who Hallow could rightfully call her own. When the truth sank in and she realized that for years she had been stuck here, needed and unwanted simultaneously, the desire to be full was a pain now too familiar to hurt.

Part II

12

It had been two decades since Laila’s public breakdown when another birthing story rocked Harlem. There weren’t large crowds of Harlemites surrounding a woman to confront the Melancons this time, however. Instead, the crowds were protestors decrying the terrible fate that had befallen a child. The condemnations—at Duke Ellington Circle near Central Park on West 110th and Fifth, at St. Nicholas and Jackie Robinson Parks, and within the pews of several churches—were so loud and overwhelming that the Melancon brownstone was affected just like everyone else’s home. With Hallow as the succcessor, she saw to it that the family was made more aware of what was happening in the neighborhood, but her family’s interest could not be aroused. They were reluctant to get involved because they were relieved that their family name was not at the center of the drama. So Hallow tried another route.

Nearly twenty years old, Hallow was fixated on this particular story, as well as the voices of young Black women across the nation. She read every op-ed and watched all of the televised interviews, hanging on every word spoken by a Black woman about Black girls and their vulnerability, and the treacherous road for many to motherhood. She read them day and night, and when she couldn’t contain her earnestness any longer, she invited other caulbearing women from other major cities—Oakland, Chicago, Houston, and Detroit—to convene at the Melancon brownstone to see what could be done, a rare move that no one else had tried in decades. Most caulbearing families had migrated out of Louisiana; most caulbearing families stayed apart from one another. They knew “safety in numbers” wasn’t a universal truth. But this, Hallow argued, was urgent. She arranged their flights and hotel rooms, and lured them with the attraction of the Apollo, Broadway, Central Park, and the Empire State Building—sites that most of them had never seen before.

After kisses and hugs were exchanged, Hallow moved them all into the living room, where she plopped the latest issue of the New York Times on the coffee table. One woman, Maha, leaned forward to see the front-page news story, where a young Black girl’s large mug shot was centered right underneath the headline, sucked her teeth, and said, “Chile.”

Two weeks prior, on a Friday evening smack-dab in the middle of September 2018, sixteen-year-old Asali Givens staggered into the Dunkin’ Donuts and Baskin-Robbins store near the corner of West 116th and Lenox Avenue. Abandoning protocol that restrooms are for customers only, a sympathetic cashier gave Asali the four-digit PIN to unlock the bathroom after she begged and pleaded that she could not wait any longer. Teens often hung out in that store, and three of them formed a line outside the bathroom. The first person in line repeatedly knocked on the door and cursed for whoever was in there to hurry the hell up. He was about to kick the door until his friend, second in line, tapped on his shoulder and pointed a finger at the blood pooling around his Air Jordans. The boys ran over to the cashier, who opened the door with a crowbar from the storage room and found Asali trying her best to wipe the lower half of her body. The cashier yelled for the manager, who shrieked at the sight of Asali’s blood-soaked jeans. She called an ambulance, but Asali refused and left a trail of blood as she exited the store. The manager followed that blood all the way back to the bathroom, where she noticed a red line that split between the toilet and the garbage can. There were bloody paper towels crumpled up and folded over the surface. The manager urged the cashier to stay back. She grabbed a pair of latex gloves from that same storage room, crept over to the trash can, and pulled a few of the paper towels from the top, revealing a dead newborn.

In a matter of hours, the police were able to locate Asali by the tracks of blood on the ground and the white transplants, who were more willing than Black natives to point them