“…that I would never sell it. Not for any price. Not when times got hard. And that it would go to the child who made her fit to be seen.” Bernadette drew a long breath and let it out. “Mama made me lay my hand on her Bible and swear it, in the hospital bed, three days before Christmas. I said, Mama, you know I would never. She said, Bernadette, you have a mortgage and a husband who was laid off. Swear it.” Destiny opened her trembling fingers. In her palm lay a small round tin button, its paint chipped, its pin bent. Black letters on a white field, in capitals: I AM A MAN.
I knew the button at once, and so did every grown person in Memphis. It was the sign carried by the sanitation workers in the spring of 1968, when thirteen hundred men put down their garbage trucks and walked, in a line, down Main Street in the rain. Bernadette told us how her father, Elijah, had marched in that line. How her mother, Pearl, had sat up night after night at the kitchen table sewing hand lettered placards. “She was thirty years old,” Bernadette said. “She did not carry a sign herself. She carried water, and soup, and she braided the hair of the other wives so they would feel dignified at the rallies.”
“On April third, Mama went to Mason Temple to hear Dr. King speak,” Bernadette went on. “The night of the mountaintop speech. There was a thunderstorm, and the doors were shaking, and she stood at the back with the button pinned to her dress. My father was in the front. When it was over, he came down the aisle and pinned his own button, the one he wore on the picket line, onto her collar. He said, Pearl, you stood with me the whole way. That is as much a man as I am.” Her voice trembled. “The next day, Dr. King was killed. My father never took that button off her dress again, not once.”
A tin button from the spring of 1968 tied in a white ribbon was never a keepsake, only a promise to the child who braided.
Destiny held the button against her chest. She was crying so hard that she could barely form the words. “Why me?” she whispered. “I am only a girl who braided her hair. She never said one word to me.” Bernadette took both her hands. “Because she saw you, Destiny. Every Sunday, for eleven years, she saw you. She told me you were the first person since my father to touch her as if she was still worth the trouble.” Her eyes were shining. “She said, Bernadette, I walked down Main Street for a man who wanted to be seen. That child makes me fit to be seen, too.”
I could not speak. I thought about all the Sunday mornings of the childhood of my daughter, her little hands working the comb in the half light, my own exhaustion after the night sort, and my hurried words in the doorway: Gentle, baby, she is tender headed. I had thought I was teaching her kindness. I had not known that the old woman across the hedge was storing every minute, like a grain of wheat, to be given back. I sank onto the hallway floor beside them and put my arms around both women, and we sat that way, rocking, for a very long time.
There was an envelope too, thin, tucked into the lace handkerchief. Bernadette handed it to Destiny. Inside was a certificate of deposit from a Memphis credit union, in the name of Destiny Marie Johnson, and a slip of paper in careful blue ink. Mama saved this one dollar at a time from her pension.
It is not much. It is for the books. My daughter read the amount, and her face went still. Eleven thousand, four hundred dollars. Eleven years of Sundays, a dollar for every braid and then some. “Books,” Destiny breathed. “For what?” Bernadette smiled. “For wherever you decide to go.”
In August, Destiny left for Spelman College in Atlanta, with a scholarship, a duffel bag, and a tin button pinned inside her jacket. She called me every Sunday morning at seven. She told me she had found a church near campus where the older ladies needed their hair done. She would do twelve heads on a Sunday, in a basement kitchen, for free. The ladies fed her peach cobbler. Someone gave her a jar of hair grease older than she was. She said, “Mama, I think I know what I was doing all those years. I was practicing.” Her roommate, a girl from Detroit, asked about the button, and Destiny told the whole story, from the picket line to the porch. By the end, the roommate was crying too. Destiny said she told it on purpose. A story like that, she said, was not made to sit in a drawer. The button rode with her to every dorm room, propped on the windowsill where the morning light could find it.
Bernadette came to visit every few months from Chicago, and we became friends, the way women do when they share a grief and a miracle. On the anniversary of the passing of Mother Pearl, we sat together on the empty porch next door, where the swing had been taken down. Bernadette said that the house was going to be sold. I asked who would buy it. She said she had told the agent that it should go to a family with a child. A family who would keep the porch light on. I felt tears prickling. “Mama would have liked that,” she said.
The new neighbors moved in last June, a young couple with a six year old girl named Imani. On the first Sunday, Imani came across the hedge, shyly, with a doll under her arm. The doll had hair like cotton candy, all tangled. She looked up at me with enormous brown eyes. “Miss Yvonne, do you know how to braid?” I smiled so hard my face ached. “No, baby,” I said gently. “But I know somebody who does. She comes home on Fridays.” And then I called my daughter, and I said, “Destiny, there is a little girl here who needs you.”
