Free Tambourines to Glory by Langston Hughes Page B

drunk, her conversations had a way of weaving continuous links that had no end—for in truth, the end was not yet. Tonight Laura was talking about her mother. It had begun with the lighted cross in the living-room panelwhich Laura said the writer from
Ebony
that afternoon had called a
symbol
. “And I thought a
cymbal
was something on a drum,” said Laura.
    “Crosses and nothing else holy don’t mean a thing if you don’t live right,” said Essie, “whatever you may call ’em. And you, Laura, singing and preaching and praying in church half the night and drinking at home the rest, you are burning your candle at both ends.”
    “My mama burned hers at both ends, also in the middle too,” said Laura. “Did I ever tell you really about my mama? Hell-raisingest woman in Charlotte society! North Carolina ain’t forgot Mama yet. My mother was from a good family, but the family claimed she did their name no good. They put her out when I was born—I’m illegitimate, you know. The principal of the school was my father—married and a father twice before he fathered me. He never would graduate my mama from that school after she became pregnant, which he did not consider respectable for a student to do. I was born in Raleigh after all of Charlotte knew I was coming—too late for Grandpa, who was a mail carrier and a preacher, to send Mama away before the news leaked out—which is why she was always in disgrace at home. Do you think Mama cared? Never cared! She went on back to Charlotte from Raleigh and stayed right there until the day she died having her thirteenth baby at the age of forty-four. Mama should have knowed better, but she kept on producing black, yellow, and brownskin children for thirty years. Had so many marriage licenses around the house, one overlapped the other. Every time Mama got drunk, she wanted to go get married. Me, being the first one, was the only child not blessed by some kind of wedlock—Catholic, Protestant,or Justice of the Peace. I told that reporter from
Ebony
today, don’t go digging too far back into my past—write about the
now
, not the
then.”
    “How come they want to write about you in the magazine?”
    “Because he says you and me’ve got the biggest independent church in Harlem—not belonging to no denomination but our own. He asked me in what did I believe. I said, ‘In myself.’ Of course, I added, ‘For publication, you better fix that statement up a little. Shall I grease your palm? Or do they pay you well on your magazine?’ He said, ‘We don’t accept money from others.’ So all I said was, ‘Do Jesus! Have a drink.’ We got on fine. Sorry you was taking your nap, Essie, when he was here interviewing. You’re always resting somewhere, so you miss a lot of what’s happening. But Mr. Morrison’s coming back with a photographer. They gonna take pictures of our lighted cross and me in my mink coat, me in my car, me singing in the pulpit with a tambourine. Girl, our church is getting famous! Had my mama lived to see me now, she’d of forgot I was a bastard.”
    “Laura!”
    “Well, I was—which is maybe why I’m what that
Ebony
man calls a personality—you know, like Eartha Kitt—with that little something extra on the ball. Essie, I got it from my mama. My mother could jive a man back, make him run and butt his head against the wall, lay down his month’s salary at her feet, then beg her for a nickel.”
    “You just the other way around,” yawned Essie, growing sleepy, “giving away money.”
    “I know. I took after my mother in reverse. Skip it! Tell a story! Mama could make a bar full of people laugh or cry, whicheverway her tale went, or if it was about ghosts, scare the hell out of ’em. Mama never saw a ghost in her life, no more than I ever saw Jesus, but she could make up ghost stories to raise the hair on your head. That’s where I get my gift of making up visions. I can tell ’em in church so well that even
you
believe me, Essie, and