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

with a “Go ’head, Auntie,” continued, “If she think she’s getting my vote, she can forget it. I’m not voting for that house nigga.”

The crowd whooped and hollered. Hallow blushed at her bold statement.

“But wait just a minute now.” A woman with a salt-and-pepper wig adjusted her pointy red glasses and sat upright. “Is Asali someone we should really be fighting for?”

The crowd began to groan.

“Hold on now, hold on now. Hear me out, ’cause y’all young folk like to always jump the gun without listening to what elders like me are tryna say. Is she someone we should really be rallying behind? Whether or not she killed that baby, she had to have known the consequences. Why aren’t we fighting for the Black boys getting gunned down in the streets by police and trigger-happy white folk? Why aren’t we fighting for people stuck in Rikers waiting for trial for just having a half gram of weed on ’em?” Another elder beside her nodded her head.

“Let me ask you something, Miss—” Abeni asked.

“Witherspoon,” she said.

“Witherspoon. Do you believe that Asali deserves to be charged as an adult?”

“Well, I don’t know! If she murdered that child—”

“What if she didn’t?” Abeni pressed.

“Still. She should still be punished.”

“Do you agree that Black people get more severe punishment by our current criminal justice system compared to white people?”

“Of course!”

“And assuming you are aware of the Raise the Age law, how could you think that Asali being charged as an adult has nothing to do with her being a Black girl?”

“I never said that, now.”

“So then if you believe our system is unjust toward Black people and if you agree that her sentencing may be influenced by her race and gender, then would you say the sentencing is appropriate?”

Miss Witherspoon remained silent.

Another woman stood to her feet. “Bottom line is that Asali shouldn’t have been charged as an adult in the first place. It’s prosecutorial brutality. It’s too harsh of a sentence and we all know why. I know Asali. I taught her at PS 149. That girl was afraid of her own shadow. She wouldn’t hurt nobody. This is the problem. She doesn’t need jail; she needs help.”

The ladies in the audience agreed in unison.

“I still don’t get why she did it, knowing the consequences,” Witherspoon added.

“Because she’s a child,” Abeni said. “And her immaturity should be taken into consideration in the eyes of the law.”

“Mm-hmm,” the crowd said.

“So what do we do now?” a young voice called out.

“We’re gonna need more mobilizing—more prayer, meditation, money—and even then, there may not be much else to do. We just have to keep up the fight—protesting, donating, educating, whatever we have to do,” Abeni said.

“What about the Melancons?”

Every woman in the sanctuary turned around toward the back, where Hallow stood to her feet and fidgeted with her fingers.

“What about ’em?” Abeni asked.

“Well, you’ve all heard the story about them, right?”

“Speak up or come up to the mic,” Abeni said.

Hallow loudly repeated herself and added, “They may have some money and they’ve been in Harlem for a long time. Maybe they can help donate.” The women’s jeers caused her armpits to be drenched with sweat, and she held on to the back of the pew in front of her to keep balance.

“Tsk. Please. Like they’d donate anything. They won’t even help us with that caul they got. Fuck those women.” A Black woman in the front-left corner looked up to the ceiling, apologized to God, and made the sign of the cross over her chest. Though Hallow was offended, she was relieved that no one could recognize who she was, much less her relation to the Melancon family. Maybe her rarely leaving the brownstone while growing up due to Maman’s strict orders was her saving grace now. She walked up to Abeni for the mic and said, “I got a cousin who hoped the caul would help with her diabetes. They didn’t help her.”

“They turned me down when I asked for help with my sickle cell!”

“Me for lupus!” two disembodied voices called out.

Then the crowd broke out into more chatter that Abeni was unable to control, even with the microphone back in her hands. Hallow couldn’t recall ever hearing Landon or anyone else in the family speak about someone needing help with their diabetes, or sickle cell, or lupus and wondered if no one brought it to her attention or she was too young to remember. Nevertheless, she was paralyzed with guilt and disbelief over those who had been affected by her family. When Abeni assessed how slowly Hallow sat back down in her seat and pulled the drawstring of her hoodie farther out, she said, “It’s okay, sweetheart. It’s just—we know this neighborhood well, and you look young, so maybe you don’t remember, but those women don’t have a good reputation. They’re money grabbers. They ain’t sticking out their necks for no one. All skinfolk, what?”

“Ain’t kinfolk!” the other women yelled in a call-and-response.

For the next few hours, Hallow sat in the back of the church in a daze. She wanted to dash out of St. Philip’s from the moment those voices spoke out about her family’s rejection of them, but she knew that would’ve been inappropriate and suspicious. So she endured the entire meeting teetering on the verge of tears and unable to gather a coherent thought in spite of her pain. If, Hallow thought, she were to confide in one of them that she was a Melancon, it might do her and her family more harm than good.

Once the town hall meeting concluded, Hallow did not hesitate to leave the church, crossing streets without so much as a cautionary glance toward the pedestrian signals. The cold sapped the moisture from her face, and she wasn’t sure if she was crying because of the bitterness of the afternoon or the embarrassment for having brought up the Melancon name to those women. She could not wait to return home and bury herself under a mountain of