THE TURNING POINT

Jenny and Mother hurried through Coolidge’s Department Store and up the flight of stairs at the back of the store, as Mother didn’t want to be late for her one o’clock appointment. The beauty parlor was in a balcony over the store. You could look down and watch the people come into the store and they might not even notice that you were watching. Mother didn’t come here often, but today she was to get a permanent wave. Most of the time she wore her hair in a smooth roll at her neckline that she secured with hairpins. It was a classic style and she could cover up the spherical mole on her neck which she considered very ugly. She didn’t like the frizzy look of a permanent and it was also expensive. She didn’t think it was good for her hair, but Daddy liked her hair better curly and she wanted to please him.

Jenny liked the little beauty shop. She had never been up here before. It was bright and clean and had a variety of interesting smells. One of the smells was terrible; it went up your nose and made your eyes water and also made you want to get out of there. Ladies sat patiently under hair dryers or with various kinds of apparatus on their heads. There were magazines to look through, different magazines than anything that came in the mail at home. To Jenny, the best part about the beauty parlor was that it seemed to her a hidden mysterious place, a secret place that not everyone knew about. At least she hadn’t known about it until today. Jenny had come to love secrets. One of the strongest bonds between Jenny and her best friend Susan was the wealth of secrets they shared. There was the Santa Claus secret. Last year they had pieced together various bits of information and solved the Santa Claus puzzle and had extended it to include the Easter rabbit. They made up secret words and codes and games.

At the age of seven and soon to be eight, Jenny’s world was changing and expanding. Her legs were getting longer and thinner, and her face had lost that round baby look. Two terms of school had taught her a lot about people outside the family circle. She had conquered many fears and had learned to do a lot of things by herself. She was becoming generally more independent and could better defend herself against Margaret. She had discovered Susan, a kindred spirit, and
they confided to each other their innermost thoughts and feelings. They understood each other.

Jenny sat on the bright plaid couch and twirled her handkerchief in the air. It had a nickel tied in the corner, and after a while, she would go to the drug store by herself and get a strawberry ice cream cone with her nickel.

The sound of the ceiling fans made a pleasant humming in the quiet store below. Jenny could hear the door opening. An old lady with a cane and dark glasses entered with a little black scotty dog on a leash. This was Mrs. Coolidge and Mother had said she was blind. Jenny wondered how she kept from bumping into things.

Jenny went back to the plaid couch and began to look through some of the magazines. Two little girls about Jenny’s age came into the store. “We would like some red anklets please,” Jenny heard them say, importantly.

“They sure think they’re smart,” she thought to herself. Mother always went with her to buy clothing.

Jenny looked through some more magazines. She was turning through the pages rapidly when a picture caught her eye. It was the picture of a baby inside it’s mother’s stomach. At first she thought it was one of those very old famous paintings of the Baby Jesus and his Mother Mary. Jenny looked at the print at the top of the page which said, “THE BIRTH OF A BABY,” in big black letters. Jenny held the magazine so that no one could see what she was reading. She was afraid someone might ask or might take the magazine away from her. This was something she had been wondering about for a long time and she devoured the pictures hungrily, and as many of the words as she was able to read and understand. There was one picture showing a very tiny thing inside the mother. It didn’t look like a baby; it looked more like a sea creature. There were more such pictures, each with the creature a little bigger, looking more like a real baby. There was a picture of the mother with a sheet over her and doctors and nurses standing around, The most impressive picture was of the doctor holding the crying baby upside down by the ankles and spanking his little bare bottom. A long thick shiny rope like thing was attached to his navel and went under the sheet.

For quite some time Jenny had doubted that babies were brought in the doctor’s black bag. Now she could tell Susan that babies really grew inside their mothers and that doctors operated on them to take them out. That explained why women were so fat before they had babies and the part about the operation explained why they had to be in bed for a while, and why the doctor had to come when a baby was born. She thought it might also be the reason that children were sometimes like their mothers, but she couldn’t imagine why they looked and acted like their fathers too. She looked at the name of the magazine. It said “LIFE” in big red letters. She put the magazine on the bottom of the stack so that she could look at it again later. She was excited about her discovery, but there was no one she could tell it to just now.

“I think I’ll go get an ice cream cone now,” she shouted to Mother, who was under a noisy machine.

“All right,” Mother called back.

Jenny walked gaily down the steps, through the store and into the blistering heat of an unseasonably hot mid-May. She bought a strawberry ice cream cone at the drug store, and after the first few delicious licks, pushed the ice cream to the bottom of the cone with her tongue so that it would last longer. She walked back to the beauty parlor ever so slowly, looking in shop windows as she ate the rest of her ice cream cone and feeling very smug.

Jenny stopped in her tracks as she opened the door of Coolidge’s, for there, buying some shoestrings, was a plump, bald headed, well dressed Negro. Jenny had only seen one other Negro before in her life, and he didn’t look at all like this man. The only Negro in this little town was a thin old fellow whose first name was Vince. He kept sadly to himself, sitting at the bottom of the office stairways along main street, watching people go by. He did odd jobs for pennies. Jenny had always been a little afraid of him. The town kids said a poem about him:

        Old Nigger Vince, 
          Sittin’ on a fence, 
        Tryin’ to make a dollar 
          Out of fifteen cents.

Jenny let the door close slowly behind her and scrutinized the black man carefully.
He saw her looking at him. This didn’t surprise him at all. He was accustomed to it.

“Is your name Patty?” he asked in a kindly, soft voice.

“No,” Jenny told him, “My name is Jenny Jane Barnes.”

“I have a little girl named Patty. She can tap dance.”

“So can I ,” Jenny said. “I learned how from a big girl at school.”

“Well, isn’t that fine. Patty must be a little older than you. I’ll tell her about you when I get home.”

The man left the store with his purchase and Jenny went back up to the beauty parlor.

“Did you talk to the darky?” the beauty parlor operator asked.

“Yes,” Jenny answered. “Mother, did you see me? He was a nice man, too.”

A lady who was getting her white hair set in rows of tiny waves said, “There’s gonna be a minstrel show here in town tonight. He must be one of their troupe. If I do say so myself, “Niggers” can sure sing and dance, though that’s about all they’re good for.”

Mother stood up and picked up her purse and paid the beauty operator. She had on a hair net and her hair was pinned tightly to her head.

“How do you like my permanent?” she asked Jenny.

“It’s Okay,” said Jenny, “but it sure stinks.” She didn’t want to tell Mother that she liked it better the way it was before.

She could hardly wait to see Susan. She had so much to tell her.